Around this time in 1931, when Jews celebrate the holiday of Hanukkah, the wife of the then Rabbi of Kiel, Rahel Posner, photographed the family chandelier on the windowsill of their home, overlooking the local headquarters building. of the Nazi party, on which hung a swastika flag. The harassment of the Jews was already in the air in Germany. On the back of the photo, Mrs. Posner wrote: “'Death to Judah,' so says the flag. ‘Judah will live forever,’ so the light answers.” Decades later, the photo would become iconic, reflecting the contrast between growing anti-Semitism and Jewish self-assertion in Germany in the 1930s.
In 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power, and that same year Rabbi Akiva Posner, his wife Rahel, and their three children, Avraham Chaim, Tova, and Shulamit, managed to emigrate, first to Belgium, and in 1934 to Palestine. Years later, his descendants in Israel lent his brass candlestick to the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem, with the only condition that every year on Hanukkah they could take it with them to celebrate this festivity as a family, one of the most joyous in Judaism.
This is what happened yesterday in Berlin, when an emotional Yehuda Mansbach, grandson of the Posner couple, lit two candles in that same chandelier in Bellevue Palace, headquarters of the Head of State, in the presence of Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. For the first time in 90 years, the precious object returned to Germany, from where its owners had to leave for their lives. "It is an honor for our country that you, as descendants of Holocaust survivors, have made the effort and have embarked on the painful journey of coming to Germany for the first time since the Shoah," Steinmeier said during the ceremony, in which There was also another granddaughter of the Posners, Nava Gilo, Yehuda's sister.
The family's Hanukkah candlestick, placed in a palace window, was lit by Mansbach, who could not hold back her tears as a children's choir sang popular songs of the time. Hanukkah, also known as the Festival of the Luminaries, evokes a prodigy that, according to Hebrew tradition, occurred in the 2nd century BC when the Maccabees, after recovering in combat the Second Temple of Jerusalem, which the Hellenes had desecrated , they realized that there was not enough pure oil to keep the ritual candlestick burning. They found a vessel, but it was not enough. Miraculously, the flames lit with that little oil burned for eight days.
To commemorate the episode, the Jews light a nine-branched candelabra, also called a chanukiah: one is lit up every night in memory of the eight days, and the ninth and central one serves as the candle to light the flame. Hanukkah is celebrated on a variable date between the end of November and mid-December. This year it started on Sunday, December 18; that's why two candles were lit yesterday.
The custom is to place the menorah in the window, so that its lights can be seen from outside. "With the rise of the Nazis, many Jews closed the curtains so that the menorah could not be seen from the street, but my grandmother was determined to show that she and her husband were not afraid," Nava Gilo recounts in an aside after the ceremony. Her grandfather kept in touch with members of the Kiel Jewish community who survived the Holocaust until his death in 1962. Rahel passed away in 1982.
The descendants of the Posner couple had never set foot in Germany, where some 200,000 Jews now live. They have done it now for educational purposes. Before Berlin, her chandelier has been at an exhibition in Kiel for three days about Jewish life in this northern port city. The trip was organized by the German Friends of Yad Vashem association, whose executive director, Ruth Ur, said that "when there are no more survivors, its objects will continue to transmit the memory of the Shoah, like this candlestick." The association promotes historical memory through objects from the Yad Vashem collection that are related to places in Germany.
"We experienced the wonderful gift of reconciliation", celebrated President Steinmeier -who was wearing a kippah-, but also warned that anti-Semitism still exists in German society, and that it must be combated.
