This is an article published on June 18, 1942 in The Palestine Post reporting that Jewish soldiers in a German prisoner of war camp lit Chanukah candles on a makeshift chanukiya constructed from food tins. The story was learned from a letter that a prisoner of war had written to his parents in Tel Aviv describing the events. The soldier was proud that he had volunteered to join the British army in their fight against Nazi Germany, even though he was taken prisoner. He also states that a chaplain from the New Zealand Army, who was working in the camp, took the chanukiya so that he could give it to the chief rabbi of New Zealand after the war. According to the soldier’s letter, the prisoners’ spirits lifted when they received their first care packages from Israel; it made them feel closer to the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community of Palestine), which represented home. The article also mentions classes that were given to the prisoners while in the camp. There were 30,000 Jews from pre-state Israel (Palestine) who volunteered to fight with the British Army in World War II.
This article is especially interesting since it refers to Jewish soldiers being able to observe Chanukah in a German prisoner of war camp at a time when Jewish civilians were being imprisoned in concentration and extermination camps where practising their Judaism would lead to punishment or death. From this article and other evidence available, it seems that Jewish prisoners of war from Western countries such as Britain, Canada, and the United States were generally treated the same way as the non-Jewish prisoners; Jewish prisoners of war from the Polish and Soviet Armies, however, were separated from the non-Jewish prisoners and treated very harshly.
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Chanuka - Chanuka celebrates the rededication of the Temple by Judah the Maccabee and his army after their victory over the Greeks in 165 BCE. One of the well-known miracles of the Chanukah story is the small portion of oil that was able to light the Menorah in the Temple and burn for eight nights. Chanukah begins on 25 Kislev and is celebrated by lighting a Chanukiya for eight nights. It is also traditional to eat fried foods (to symbolise the oil) and play with spinning tops known as dreidles.
Chanukiya - A chanukiya is the special menorah (candelabra) that is lit on the holiday of Chanukah. Candles are lit to commemorate the miracle of the oil, which despite being enough to last for only one day, miraculously lasted for eight days. The chanukiyah is lit every night of the eight-day festival with an additional candle being added each day, so that by the last night, all eight are lit. Chanukiyot are traditionally placed in the window or by the door of the house in order to publically proclaim the Chanukah miracle. Ideally it is lit with oil, preferably olive oil, but candles are also permissible and are more common nowadays. The chanukiyah is often wrongly called a menora, which was the seven-branched candelabra lit as part of the daily worship in the temple. The chanukiya, however, has nine branches, one for each of the days of Chanukah and one for the shamash, the candle which is used to light the others.
The Palestine Post – The Palestine Post was a daily, English-language newspaper, founded in 1932 in Jerusalem. In 1950, its name was changed to The Jerusalem Post and it continues to be in print to this day. The newspaper’s intended audience was English readers in Palestine and nearby regions: British Mandate officials, local Jews and Arabs, Jewish readers abroad, tourists, and Christian pilgrims. At its peak, in 1944, circulation reached 50,000 newspapers a day. The newspaper covered events in the region and around the world. The Palestine Post offers a glimpse into some of the central events of the twentieth century including World War II, the Holocaust, and the development of the post-war world order. It is a rich source of information on pre-State Israel, the history of the Yishuv (Jewish settlement in Eretz Yisrael), the creation of the State of Israel, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and the 1948 War of Independence. The newspaper includes a wealth of information on Jewish communities around the world.
Holocaust – The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide and persecution of European Jewry by the German Nazi regime and its collaborators in Europe and North Africa during World War II. The Holocaust was implemented in stages from Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party’s first rise to power. From 1933 anti-Jewish laws were passed in Germany which excluded the Jews from German society. The Nazis also began to create a network of concentration camps where Jews and other “undesirable elements” of society were imprisoned in inhumane conditions. With the Nazi occupation of Europe during World War II, which started in 1939, the formal persecution of Jews was implemented in all the occupied countries. Jews were sent to ghettos, made to work in forced labour, and lived in appalling conditions. In 1942 the Nazis held the Wannsee Conference where they decided on the Final Solution which detailed the extermination all the Jews of Europe. Initially, more than one million Jews were exterminated by death squads named Einsatzgruppen, who were assisted by local collaborators. As of 1942 Jews were deported from the ghettos to death camps in Poland, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, where millions were murdered in gas chambers on arrival. Jews who were not immediately murdered were sent to force labour, and many died as a result of the harsh conditions, starvation, and disease. Jewish resistance was extremely difficult, but attempts to fight the Nazis were made by Jewish partisans and fighters in uprisings such as, most famously, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Sobibor Uprising. In 1944, as it became clear that the Nazis were losing the war, Nazi camp commanders began to close the camps and forced the survivors to march towards Germany. Already sick and weak from the years of violence, more than 250,000 Jews died on these death marches. The Holocaust came to an end with the defeat of the Nazis in May 1945. Six million Jews, two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, were murdered with millions more experiencing tremendous suffering, violence, and loss. In addition to the Jews, millions of Roma (gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled people, and Soviet and Polish prisoners of war were also murdered during the Holocaust.
