Viewpoint: Hanukkah has a bar mitzvah

Jewish people around the world are getting ready to celebrate Hanukkah. Edward Serotta, director of www.centropa.org, an institute specialising in Jewish history and culture in Central Europe, has been documenting and photographing Jewish life there since the mid-1980s. He explains why the "festival of lights" is particularly symbolic this year.

Hanukkah concert in Bacau, Romania, a small town in the Carpathian mountains in the mid-1980s. Pic E Serotta

As often as I could in the 1980s, I attended Hanukkah celebrations in Romania. The country's chief rabbi, the late Moses Rosen, toured the country in a battered bus and, in more than a dozen cities where the synagogues were filled only on that night each year, children lit the candles of the menorah, choirs sang their hearts out, and grandmothers prepared mountains of potato pancakes.

If you ever wanted to photograph, and feel, what Judaism was like in Eastern Europe in days of yore, this was the time and place to do it.

LATVIAN LATTKE Some 12,000 Jews live in Latvia, mostly in the capital Riga. Edward Serotta's mini documentary, the Latvian Lattke contest, shows residents celebrating Hanukkah at the Jewish Community Center in Riga, which was only able to open at the end of the Soviet era. (Macromedia Flash file) Click here to watch the mini-doc

When Hanukkah arrived on 22 December, 1989, I left my home in Budapest, drove across the Romanian border, and headed into Timisoara, looking for the synagogue.

I almost ran into a tank covered with soldiers. Bullets were flying, people were screaming. Something about a revolution, someone yelled. While there would be no menorahs lit in the Timisoara synagogue that night, the torch of communism was clearly being doused. Suddenly, and unexpectedly, the future was wide open.

Most Jews clearly held back. If the new year brought multi-party democracies, free and fair elections and real constitutions, then maybe the next Hanukkah would be the first real one.

This is why in Budapest in 1990, more than 3,500 people flocked to the Hanukkah dance. This is why, all during that year, parents in a dozen cities planned the opening of Jewish kindergartens, schools, even summer camps.

As if in a parallel universe, however, while Jews in former communist countries spent the first part of the 1990s throwing themselves into rebuilding their communities, I continued to hear from some Americans and some Israelis that neo-Nazism and anti-Semitic parties would sweep into power, and that the vast majority of Jews, now unshackled, would flee to Israel.

Accomplishment

The far right did not sweep into power in Central and Eastern Europe. Nearly all of those that did make it into their national parliaments were soon swept back out. And, while many Jews did move to Israel, by the beginning of this decade, far more were choosing to stay.

Many of those from the Soviet Union were choosing to emigrate to Germany and remain in Europe, rather than choose Israel. In other words, despite what they were being told from the outside, many Jews felt that a viable Jewish (and obviously economic) life was not only possible at home, it was preferable to the alternatives on offer.

In this 13th year of freedom in these former communist countries tens of thousands of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe will dance around their synagogues and social halls and fry up tens of thousands of potato pancakes

Thirteen years later (which, coincidentally, is the year Jewish boys and girls are bar and bat mitzvahed and become adults), it is remarkable to see how much has been accomplished.

Nearly 9,000 children attend Jewish schools, more than that travel each year to Jewish summer camps, yet more spend their Friday nights and Sunday mornings in newly refurbished community centers and synagogues (credit must be given to those that have poured tens of millions of dollars into such programmes: the Joint Distribution Committee, the Claims Conference and the Ronald S Lauder Foundation in the US, and World Jewish Relief in London).

Eternal flame

We know there are more than a few jokes about how Jews prefer to worry rather than celebrate, fret rather than cheer, wring their hands rather than clap them. But there's nothing wrong with being circumspect, especially in a continent that, for the most part (Bulgaria and Denmark being the most notable exceptions) turned its back during the Holocaust.

Hanukkah party at the Riga Jewish Community Center, Latvia, 2000. Photo E Serotta

Nor is it wrong to be doubtful, when banks, insurance companies, national museums, corporations and finance ministries refused for 50 years to listen to the pleas of those who asked to have a savings account returned, an insurance policy or pension honoured, a painting, a house, an apartment given back.

Just as it is highly suspicious that those who are especially shrill at Ariel Sharon's policies never raised a finger during the three-year siege of Sarajevo, nor concerned themselves with the massacre in Rwanda. Why is it that when it comes to Jews, a few Europeans (certainly not the majority) suddenly get religion, so to speak?

But in this 13th year of freedom in these former communist countries, despite renewed charges by some Americans and some Israelis, that all Europe is a sea of Jewish hatred, tens of thousands of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe will dance around their synagogues and social halls, fry up tens of thousands of potato pancakes, and thrill to hear their children caterwaul their way through age old melodies.

And for the following eight nights, they will light thousands and thousands of Hanukkah menorahs, in their synagogues, in their schools, in their homes.

They say that Hanukkah, which revolves around the legend of the tiny flame that wouldn't go out, lasts eight nights. In this part of the world, Hanukkah has had a good 13-year run. It wouldn't be out of place to tip the hat to these small communities for all they've done these past few years. It wouldn't even be a sin to applaud them.