Hanukkah Candle-Lighting Ceremony Held Outside Tree Of Life Synagogue
(JTA) — A Hanukkah candle-lighting ceremony to strengthen and heal the Pittsburgh Jewish community was held outside of the Tree of Life synagogue building.
Hundreds gathered Sunday evening around a towering electric menorah in front of the building where 11 worshippers were killed by a gunman during Shabbat morning services. The eight-branched menorah stood in the spot where a temporary memorial had been erected for the victims of the shooting attack, which had been visited by thousands, including President Donald Trump, in the days following the Oct. 27 attack.
The candle for the first night of Hanukkah was lit by a group including police officers, paramedics, the head of the local FBI office and survivors of the massacre, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.
“As in ancient times, [when] Jewish people strove for independence, strove for religious freedom, so, too, today we strive to be able to freely worship in our sacred places,” Rabbi Jonathan Perlman of the New Light congregation, that met in the building and lost congregants, told the crowd on Sunday night.
He said that Hanukkah will never be the same for him. “I never made the connection before between hope and Hanukkah. But from now on, I will always celebrate this holiday with the idea that hope is always a possibility,” he said, according to the newspaper.
Perlman and Rabbi Jeffrey Myers of Tree of Life/Or L’Simcha led the crowd in singing Hanukkah songs.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO