Honors and accolades usually come to those who have “paid their dues,” and Abe Weinrib certainly qualifies. Facing six years of the worst the Nazis had to offer during the Holocaust, he recently received a very special privilege, as the article below shares.
The start of Hanukkah on Saturday night had special meaning for a Holocaust survivor in Ohio who turns 100 next week. Abe Weinrib was selected to light the first candle on a 13-foot public menorah at Easton Town Center in Columbus on Saturday evening. Hanukkah commemorates the reclamation by the Maccabees of the Second Jewish Temple after it was desecrated by Syrian Greeks in the second century B.C. Hanukkah runs through sundown on December 16.
“He’s lighting a candle of hope, of love and of meaning,” said Rabbi Areyah Kaltmann of the Lori Schottenstein Chabad Center in New Albany, which sponsors the Easton menorah lighting and another in Bexley on Tuesday. “He is the flame. His life and Hanukkah are synonymous.”
Weinrib was in his 20s, working in Polish factories owned by his wealthy industrialist uncle, when he was arrested and beaten repeatedly by Nazi police who believed that he knew where his uncle might have hidden gold, silver and diamonds. He spent six years imprisoned in several camps, including the notorious Auschwitz, where more than 1 million prisoners died.
He remembers giving a portion of his bread to other prisoners, having a job dragging corpses to ditches and seeing then-Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower cry over the carnage. He was at the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany when it was liberated in 1945 by British forces. Near death with typhus, he was sent to Sweden to recover.
“Rather than blowing out 100 candles, he’d rather light one candle representing kindness and good deeds,” Kaltmann said. “He wants this to be the way he ushers in his next century. He knows that every day he is alive is a blessing.”
Corrie ten Boom received a number of honors and accolades, too. And, like Mr. Weinrib, she faced the worst the Nazis had to offer as well. To learn more about her ordeals, read her book, THE HIDING PLACE, and or take a virtual tour of her home in Ha’arlem, Holland which has been turned into a museum by clicking on www.tenboom.com. While hopefully you will never have to endure what these two were forced to face, you can show your dedication to God’s Chosen People as the ten Booms did for a hundred years prior to WW II by praying for the peace of Jerusalem, per Psalm 122:6!
To read more, go to the SeattlePi.com website.
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