Rabbi Dovrat

CHANUKAH, the Jewish festival of Lights, is here and Wellington’s tiny Orthodox Jewish community is celebrating.

Many non-Jews think of Chanukah as a kind of eight-day Jewish Christmas, but Israeli Rabbi Chaim Dovrat, of the Orthodox Synagogue and Jewish Community Centre on Webb St, says the festival is less about gifts than perseverance and strength.

“The message of Chanukah is you can’t extinguish the light,” he says. “The light will overcome the dark, always.”

Chanukah is the Jewish festival of the oppressed, the underdog, in which families light a candles, one each day for eight days at sun set.

It commemorates a second century Jewish uprising after which the Temple in Jerusalem was restored and the eternal flame miraculously burned for eight days.

It is a message of perseverance despite adversity, which is particularly important to a tiny Wellington Orthodox community struggling with decreasing numbers and an aging congregation.

Rabbi Dovrat says with only 1500 people in the Wellington community, almost half of whom are elderly, there are limited financial resources for all the services the Jewish Centre provides.

“[There’s] the centre to run, to hire the rabbi, for teachers in the school.  It costs money and they don’t have it.  Twenty years ago it used to be a bigger community, a younger community,” he says.

The Jewish Centre provides key assistance for the wider community beyond simply providing a rabbi and synagogue services.

They currently have three staff to help elderly members of the community, and two more facilitating the youth movement, conducting Sunday schools and arranging youth events.

The centre also provides a kosher shop and teachers for the Moriah Primary School and kindergarten.

“We would like to do more things,” says the rabbi.  “We want to buy more books for the children next year.”

He says with costs rising due to the recession, individuals can no longer rely on the community to help if they want to participate in events.

FAMILY CELEBRATION: a family menorah on the first night of Chanukah. credit: Beth Kanter

“Not everybody can afford it.  So we want to subsidise things like youth camp in the summer.”

He worries too, about a replacement rabbi when his tenure ends.

“My joke is every mother wants her son to be a lawyer or a doctor, but rabbi is not a good job for a Jewish child,” he says lightly of the reason why there are no local rabbis to take his place.

The real reason, he explains, is again because of the size of the community and also a lack of dedicated Jewish schooling.

“Nobody will say here in high school ‘I want to be a rabbi’ and then go off to Israel for five years and then come back.  No.”

He says, although New Zealand has contributed rabbis to the international community in the past, it is a rare occurrence to find someone willing to make the 10-year-long commitment to training.

“We export rabbis, but it’s a very small number.”

Despite the issues facing the Wellington community, Rabbi Dovrat describes members as dedicated and outward-looking.

They recently donated 20 Samoan language Christian Bibles to Maninoa Village to replace those destroyed in the tsunami and the rabbi travels to smaller, more isolated Jewish communities around the country when he can.

But he says it is not enough for Orthodox Jews who must follow Jewish law to the letter.

“Community without a rabbi, without synagogue, without service, is not a community. It’s more social. So they are familiar with the Jewish tradition, or we call it folk lore.  [For Chanukah] they come and have something good to eat together, but not for the religious point of view.”

SPIRITUAL GIFT: Rabbi Dovrat in Samoa. The Orthodox Jewish community donated 20 Samoan language Bibles to Maninoa Villiage.

But even if it is not a religious observance, kindling the Chanukah lights is still relevant.

“Of course, light…represents something important in Jewish culture. Light is the soul of a person, something spiritual.

“We even put the candles in the window to show that we are lighting the street, lighting the darkness outside and the light will increase every day, more and more for eight days.”

Rabbi Dovrat illustrates the power of Chanukah lights for Jewish people with the story of Natan Sheransky, former Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, who spent 12 years in a Russian jail for anti-communist activism in the 1970s.

Sheransky, he says, credits Chanukah with giving him strength to survive the Siberian labour camp where he was interred.

“He said never give up. You are a minority. God sometimes help even the minority. You don’t have to give up your religion and your ideology because you are a minority.

“Chanukah gave him strength in his dark days.”

For Wellington Jews, celebrating the historical event is about remembering no matter how isolated or small you are, help comes to those in most need.

“There is a message not to give up, not to give in. If there is persecution against the Jewish people or any time in history, God is helping us.”