Community
Yellow candles shedding light on Shoah victims
Remembrance project will this year see 30,000 candles lit in the UK
April 24, 2019 12:37
Remembrance project will this year see 30,000 candles lit in the UK
April 24, 2019 12:37This time last year, Louise Hulland’s Twitter feed was full of shared pictures of yellow candles being lit on Yom Hashoah to commemorate Holocaust victims.
Ms Hulland wanted to take part, but was unsure if a non-Jew could do so. “I assumed it was families remembering their lost souls,” she recalled.
However, the London-based broadcast journalist quickly realised that as the accompanying name tags were identical in layout, “those being remembered weren’t family members. This wasn’t a homemade tradition but something much bigger.”
This year, she will be among those lighting one of the 30,000 memorial candles being distributed across the UK by Maccabi GB in the biggest version of the project introduced here by Masorti Judaism in 2017.
Ms Hulland said she had learned more about the initiative from a friend on social media.
“It was genuinely one of the most moving things I’d ever heard of and I asked him if it would be appropriate for me to take part next time, even though I’m not Jewish.
“I’m waiting for my candle to arrive — and preparing to read about the lost soul I shall be lighting it in honour of.”
In addition to individual participants, more than 60 organisations including synagogue bodies, welfare charities and schools have requested candles, which will be lit on the evening of May 1.
Jewish Care is distributing 3,000 to clients, volunteers and staff. One of the first recipients was volunteer Elaine Jankel, who said: “Although I didn’t directly lose any family in the Holocaust, I know that the life of my mother-in-law, her sister and parents took a dramatic turn when they fled from Romania to what was then known as Palestine in 1942.”
She will be lighting a candle for Taube Psavko, who died in Latvia, aged 29.
“She never got to have her own children and live life to the full,” Ms Jankel said.
“It seems almost impossible to imagine the fear and desperation of those times.”
Jewish Care chief executive Daniel Carmel-Brown will be lighting candles with his wife and three children.
“If you talk to any of the members at Jewish Care’s Holocaust Survivors’ Centre, they will tell you their greatest concern for the future is people will forget what happened and that history will repeat itself,” he said. “It is for us to ensure we keep their legacy alive.”
Susanne Szal, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, will be honouring the memory of Faige Apfeldorfer, a four-year-old who died in Auschwitz in 1944.
“We have lost many in the Holocaust but I, along with my brothers and sister, are here to remember them and to live in their name.”
David Lawson said he will be lighting two candles, one for Slomo Gross of Velký Berezny, the other for the 8,000-plus Jews from the Czech city of Ostrava who were murdered.
“It seems the right and proper thing to do,” he said.
Melinda Crème, whose family will be lighting three candles, felt it was “extremely grounding to know that there once lived a child who perished when they were similar to our own children’s ages.
“The flame makes them come alive for 24 hours as we acknowledge their names in our homes in freedom. It has become a tangible way of teaching about the Holocaust.”
Gillian Lazarus, a member of Shaarei Tsedek North London Reform Synagogue, considered it “a mitzvah to remember those who died in the Shoah”.
The project was also important in the fight against Holocaust denial, which had become “visible in the mainstream”.
