By the Light of the White House Menorah - Jeff Jacoby 16/12

ChossidMom

Wed, Dec 19 2007, 5:46 pm

By the Light of the White House Menorah
by Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe, December 16, 2007

On the seventh night of Hanukkah in 1944, my father was in Auschwitz. He
had been deported with his parents and four of his five siblings to the
Nazi extermination camp eight months earlier; by Hanukkah, only my father
was still alive. That year, he kindled no Hanukkah lights. In Auschwitz,
where anything and everything was punishable by death, any Jew caught
practicing his religion could expect to be sent to the gas chambers, or
shot on the spot.

Like other Jewish holidays, Hanukkah was often chosen deliberately by the
Nazis as an occasion for murdering Jews. In *Hasidic Tales of the
Holocaust,* the historian Yaffa Eliach recounts one suc h slaughter:
The men selected were marched outside. SS men with rubber truncheons and
iron prods awaited them. They kicked, beat, and tortured the innocent
victims. When the tortured body no longer responded, the revolver was
used. . . . The brutal massacre continued outside of the barracks until
sundown. When the [Nazis] departed, they left behind heaps of hundreds of
tortured and twisted bodies.

On the seventh night of Hanukkah in 2007, I was in the White House.
President and Mrs. Bush have made it an annual tradition to host a
Hanukkah celebration in addition to the customary White House x-mas
parties, and my wife and I were honored to receive an invitation to this
year's reception. It was in every way a beautiful and festive event. It
was also an unmistakably Jewish one, from the lavish buffet dinner
prepared in a meticulously koshered White House kitchen, to the Hebrew
songs performed by the Zamir Chorale, to the several hundred guests drawn
from every segment of the American Jewish community. There was even a
spontaneous worship service in the Green Room, where at one point about
two dozen guests assembled for Maariv, the Jewish evening prayers. All
this in a White House richly decorated for x-mas and occupied by a
president who is devoutly Christian. It is hard to imagine a more
compelling illustration of the American culture of religious tolerance
and freedom
.

Earlier in the evening there had been a menorah lighting in the Grand
Foyer of the White House. Hanukkah commemorates the victory of Jews who
fought long ago to preserve their religious identity in the face of an
oppressive government determined to erase it, and President Bush spoke of
the ongoing str uggle for religious liberty today. As we light the
Hanukkah candles this year,he said, we pray for those who still live
under the shadow of tyranny.

He described his private meeting earlier in the day with a small group of
Jewish immigrants to the United States.
Many of these men and women fled from religious oppression in countries
like Iran and Syria and the Soviet Union, Bush said. Among those in
attendance was Baghdad-born Ruth Pearl, who was 15 when her family like
so many other Jewish families in the Arab world was forced to flee from
Iraq.
She and her husband Judea, the parents of slain Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Pearl, had come to the White House with their family
menorah, which Daniel's great-grandfather Chayim had taken with him when
he escaped Poland for Palestine in 1924. Daniel was murdered in 2002 by
Islamist te rrorists in Pakistan; his only crime, observed Bush, was being
a Jewish American something Daniel Pearl would never deny.

Auschwitz, Baghdad, Poland, Pakistan: In so many places, across so many
generations, to be Jewish has meant to be oppressed, excluded,
terrorized. More than most people, Jews know what it means to be a hated
and persecuted minority.

And more than most, therefore, they have reason to be profoundly grateful
for the United States and its blessings. America is what the Jewish sages
called malchut shel chesed a benevolent and generous nation. In the long
history of the Jews, America has been a safe harbor virtually without
parallel. Nowhere in all their wanderings have the Jews known such
freedom, peace, and prosperity.

So I strolled about the White House last week, gazing at the portraits of
past presidents a nd first ladies and listening to the Marine Band play I
Have A Little Dreidel. By the light of the White House menorah, I thought
about my father, and about the unimaginable distance from the hell he
knew in 1944 to this place of joy and warmth where I found myself in
2007. I was overcome with a feeling of gratitude so intense that for a
moment I was too choked up to speak. To be an American and a Jew is truly
to be doubly blessed.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)