Hanukkah in Paris: 'Victory of the Light'
JERUSALEM, Israel About 6,000 people gathered in Paris Sunday evening to light the giant Hanukkiah (menorah) at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, marking the first night of Hanukkah.
The ceremony, sponsored by the Paris branch of the international Chabad-Lubavitch movement, took place despite a citywide ban prohibiting large gatherings in the wake of the Nov. 13 terror attacks, The Daily Beast reported.
Chabad has participated in the annual event in Paris for the past 25 years.
"Paris police had discouraged local Chabad emissaries from conducting public Hanukkah celebrations and called for major lighting ceremonies to be cancelled," a statement on the group's website read. "Chabad has always taken the position that shutting down its Jewish activities would be a capitulation to terror."
"The eternal message of the menorah lights has taken on a special significance in the current time period in that the forces of oppression and darkness have made their presence known," the statement read. "The victory of the light is a story for our times."
At Sunday's ceremony, one official said Hanukkah "demonstrates the superiority of light over darkness, of right over might, of hope over fear."
The November attacks, which left 130 dead, were not the first targeting French Jews. This past January, Islamists killed four in a kosher supermarket in a Paris suburb.
In 2012, a year marked by a 40 percent rise in anti-Semitic attacks, a terrorist gunned down a rabbi and three children, aged 8, 6 and 3, at a Jewish day school in Toulouse.
For the first time in 2014, more French Jews made aliyah (immigrated to Israel under the Law of Return) than any other nationality.
On Tuesday, the Jewish Agency will be at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport to welcome another planeload of French Jews with a candle lighting ceremony marking the third night of Hanukkah.
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