The Chanukah Lamp is Full as a New Year Dawns

The candles glow brightly as the Chanukiah is full. While it is not a cold, snowy winter here in Vero Beach, it is still the darkest time of the year, and the Chanukah lights push back the darkness.

Coincidentally this year, the eighth night of Chanukah falls on New Year’s Day, a day that beckons us to contemplate the dreams of health and fulfillment that we hope the new year will bring.

Vickie and I chose to spend a good part of the day previewing, “The Boy in the Woods,” which I will discuss as part of the Treasure Coast Jewish Film Festival this Sunday.

It is what I call “hardcore” Holocaust film giving us yet another glimpse at the full extent of Nazi brutality. It is the true story of a boy who survived the horror, after his parents, sister and extended family were all murdered, by hiding in the woods for more than a year.

Now that I have seen the film, I have begun to read the book.

Maxwell Smart, born Oziak Fromm, is now 94. As a 12-year old boy he survived the Shoah by living in the woods, often in great peril, from Ukrainian or Nazi Jew hunters. He has survived and fulfilled his childhood dream of becoming a noted artist.

Inevitably, the film brings to mind the one and half million Jewish children who did not survive.

Were it not for the glow of the Chanukah lamp, the heart wrenching story would depress me even more than it does. The Shoah is not the first time Jews have suffered persecution and discrimination, and I fear it will not be the last.

But Chanukah lights remind us that no tyrant from Pharaoh in Egypt to Antiochus of Assyria, to Torquemada or Spain, to Titus of Rome, to Hitler in Germany, and the many others interspersed with these devils will ever succeed.

Only we Jews through indifference to our sacred heritage can destroy ourselves.

And so acknowledging what history has so frequently imposed upon us, we light and bless the candles in our full Chanukiot walking toward the light with courage and with hope.

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