Corsica Just Had Its First Hanukkah Celebration Ever
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
(JTA) — Corsica saw its first public celebration of Hanukkah in its recorded history, according to the French Mediterranean island’s only rabbi.
The event took place in the central Foch Square of the capital Ajaccio on Tuesday, the last of the Jewish holiday’s eight days, on which Jews light menorahs with candles, the Corse-Matin daily reported.
“This has been the first time in the history of the Island of Beauty that the Hanukkah menorah was lit in public,” Rabbi Levi Pinson told the daily, adding it is “a historic moment.” Pinson, 27, and his wife, Mushky, opened the country’s first permanent Beit Chabad – that Hasidic movement’s term for a Jewish community center and synagogue – last year.
Ajaccio Mayor Laurent Marcangeli said he was “proud to be the first mayor of any city in Corsica to permit the lighting of candles in public,” as he put it. He said it was “an important message of tolerance.”
Several hundred people attended the candle lightings, including Jews who traveled there especially for the ceremonies from the southern mainland city of Nice, located 120 miles north of Ajaccio. “I have to say I sort of expected to see only 20 people here this evening,” Nice resident Alain Schraub told Corse-Matain. The local Jewish community of a few dozen people is “small but dynamic,” he said.
Yvonne Malka Cohen, whose parents settled in Corsica in 1919 said that for her, the candle lighting was “the biggest celebration” she’s ever seen at Fosch Square.
Roni Barkats, a local barber and member of the Jewish community, attended Tuesday’s ceremony while wearing a kippah and singing Hanukkah songs. He told the Corse-Matain daily it was a “moving experience.”
Whereas on mainland France anti-Semitic attacks have become routine, with hundreds of incidents reported annually, “you never experience anything like that here,” Barkats said. “Jews here live in security.”
Corsica was the only region in France whose authorities, operating under the Nazi puppet Vichy Government, refused to comply with orders to round up and deport Jews to be murdered. Thousands were saved thanks to authorities turning a blind eye to the presence of refugees and local Jews, and then falsely reporting to headquarters that Corsica had no or very few Jews.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
