HIGHLANDS RANCH — The menorah wasn’t the only light bringing warmth and inspiration to Hanukkah festivities here Thursday night.
Jack Adler, an 81-year-old Holocaust survivor, lit the giant eight-branched candelabrum outside the Highlands Ranch Eastridge Recreation Center on South University Boulevard.
“Jack Adler is a walking menorah,” said Rabbi Avraham Mintz of the Chabad Jewish Center in Lone Tree.
The Jewish Festival of Lights is an eight-day celebration beginning on the 25th day of the Jewish month of Kislev — sundown Wednesday.
Hanukkah commemorates the miracle of a one-day supply of pure oil that burned for eight days during rededication of the Temple after a successful Maccabean revolt against oppression by the Selucid Greek government in the 2nd century B.C.
Adler knows firsthand about oppression.
“When religion is used to spread hate, it’s no religion,” Adler said. “The only way humanity will survive is through mutual respect.”
Adler, born in Pabianice, Poland, once had parents, two sisters, a brother and an extended happy family of 83 people. His family owned a successful textile business in the nearby large city of Lodz.
Nazi soldiers marched into his hometown in September 1939 and forced Jews into a special section, or ghetto, where minimal rations and illness led to the deaths of his mother and older brother.
The family was moved again, to the larger Lodz Ghetto, and then to the Auschwitz/Birkenau concentration camp system. His sisters died there. His father moved on to a work camp and later to Dachau, where he died.
Adler was the only member of his immediate family to live to see liberation May 1, 1945. He was 16. As a young war orphan, he moved to Chicago, where he attended high school and college. He married and had two children.
He came to Denver in 1985, where his grown daughter lives. People here encouraged him, he said, to tell his story.
“When I speak, it all comes back, and it’s very difficult to do,” Adler said. “There are many people who never talk about it and who hate to talk about it. But it helps me in the sense that I can speak on behalf of those who perished.”
Adler has spoken across the state and country, sometimes reaching 45,000 people a year. He talks to schoolchildren, civic groups, military cadets and soldiers.
He asks people to reject racism, bigotry and bullying.
“We have not learned much,” Adler said. “The only thing we have learned from the evil of the Holocaust is that hate is a contagious disease.”
Hanukkah, Mintz said, celebrates freedom and renews the sense of a strong Jewish identity.
Inside the recreation center, festivities included a toy drive, gifts, treats, crafts and attractions for children such as balloon animals and face painting.
Inside the center, it’s hard to imagine a place such as Auschwitz.
“Today we rededicate ourselves to making the world a better and brighter place,” Mintz said. “Hanukkah also transmits the universal message that ultimately good will prevail over evil, freedom over oppression and light over darkness.”