‘LIGHT BEGETS LIGHT’

With a stiff breeze feeding a torch carried past them Sunday evening, scores of people lit candles outside The Jacksonville Landing to observe the sixth night of Hanukkah.

“Light is meant to be spread. Light begets light,” Rabbi Yoseph Kahanov, executive director of Chabad of Northeast Florida, told about 125 people gathered to mark the Jewish festival. “The soul of man is the candle of God. So let’s light up our candles.”

Shortly before sundown, a giant menorah was lit at the end of Hogan Street to cap events designed to promote Jewish pride and traditions.

People had traveled in car caravans from three locations to the Landing as a parade to add visibility to the gathering.

Hanukkah, an eight-day festival, recalls events surrounding a rebellion against a Seleucid Greek government that prevented Jewish religious practices and defiled the Jewish temple in Jerusalem in the second century B.C.

The temple was rededicated after the rebellion. The festival is eight days because of a tradition that a one-day supply of oil for the temple menorah – the only supply not considered defiled by the Greeks – lasted for eight days while fresh oil was prepared.

Speakers at Sunday’s event also praised America’s tradition of religious tolerance, with Kahanov adding that lighting of a large menorah in public would be suppressed in many nations.

City Councilman Clay Yarborough told the group the celebration reflected the country’s constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.

Before the lighting there was a small fair and a presentation by Mad Science of Jacksonville, a group teaching children scientific principles with colorful demonstrations.

Beakers of colored water bubbled feverishly and spewed fumes after dry ice was dropped in for Sheryl Dwyer’s explanation of how super-cold carbon dioxide changes from a solid to a gas as it warms.

“Can you guys say ‘sublimation?’” Dwyer urged a group of about 15 elementary school-age children, who yelled the word back at her.

In earshot of the science lesson, a group of men who comprised a minyan – a gathering of 10 or more – recited prayers.