“The Candle of God is the soul of man.”
Proverbs 20:27
Towards the end of WWII, rabbi Shraga Shmuel Shnitzler, a Hungarian Chassid
and Torah scholar was deported from Theresienstadt to Bergen-Belsen.
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| Hungarian Jews |
Despite
the horrors he continued to suffer, he always tried to encourage his fellow
inmates.
"A Jew and despair are contradictory in essence; they cannot
co-exist," he would often tell them.
Reb Shmelke, as he was called, managed to organize a minyan for the
prayer times and at night told Chassidic stories to the men in his barrack.
The
SS assigned him the job of removing the dead bodies from inmates who had died during
the night of illness and malnutrition.
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| Chanukiah made by a prisoner in a forced labor camp in Upper Silesia |
A few weeks before the Chanukah holiday, Reb Shmelke asked around if
anybody had a bit of oil or something that could be substituted. Especially
during these dark times, he wanted to light the Chanukah candles. It would
bring much needed encouragement and hope to the Jews in the camp. There would
be light shining in the deepest darkness. They would celebrate the victory of
few over many and the pure over the impure. But there was nobody who could give
him some oil, not even a drop to light the first Chanukah ‘candle’ for a few
seconds.
On the day before Chanukah, Reb Shmelke was ordered to go to a barrack
where some people had died the previous night. While walking across a field, he
almost tripped when his foot got stuck in a small hole in the frozen earth.
After a quick look around to make sure no Nazi guards saw him, he knelt
to investigate. Inside the hole he found a jar with some liquid. Oil! Oil
for Chanukah! he thought.
But there was more.
Carefully he pulled out a
package. Inside the paper wrapping were eight little cups and eight thin
strands of cotton.
Who buried this? he wondered. Where is he? Transported to
another camp? Or did he die?
Perhaps the man will come back for his hidden treasure.
Reb
Shmelke quickly reburied the items. It would also have been too dangerous for
him to keep them in his possession.
Every Jew he met during the day, he asked, “I found some oil and a
menorah. Did you hide them?”
His fellow prisoners thought he had lost his mind. Nobody hid any oil
or even a menorah.
On the first night of Chanukah, the men in Reb Shmelke’s barrack watched
as he lit the first little light and recited the blessing. There were smiles
and tears, as they silently watched the tiny flame fighting its eternal battle
against the surrounding darkness. The spark of hope that was kindled in their
broken hearts was rekindled for eight nights.
Four very long months later, Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the Allied
Forces.  |
| Religious Jews in the Bergen-Belsen DP camp, after the war |
Reb Shmelke returned to a city in Hungary called “Tchabe”, where he
ministered to other Holocaust survivors.
The “Tchabe Rov” eventually moved to London where
he helped set up a Torah center for young scholars. In 1950 he came home to
Israel, where he lived until he passed away in 1990 at the age of 90.
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| Reb Shmelke |
While touring the USA, Reb Shmelke went to visit the Satmar Rebbe,
Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, in Brooklyn.
"I hear that you had the great honor of lighting Chanukah candles
in Bergen-Belsen," the Satmar Rebbe said.
"How does the Rebbe know that?"
“I too was in Bergen-Belsen,” he told him. “By bribing camp officials, I
managed to put together a package of oil, cups, and wicks, which I then buried
in a field. I was never able to use them because I was rescued from that camp, four
days before Chanukah. But you know, I
always believed that it would be found by someone who would know exactly what
to do with it."
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| Quote from David Ben-Gurion |
Adapted from online articles:
