Speaker of the Knesset Yuli Edelstein told this story during a visit to a small classroom at
the Zion Brina school in Beitar Illit.
Edelstein described the events of
December 19, 1984, the day he was
sentenced to three years in prison in a
Soviet labor camp in southern Siberia.
The charge was “drug possession,” but
the real reason was his Zionist and
Jewish activity.
“After spending three months in a
dungeon, I came to court to hear the
sentence,” Edelstein told the students.
“The hall was filled with police and
security personnel. In a regular trial,
relatives are allowed to come, but the
government had filled all the seats
with security guards so that there
would be no room for my family
members. Only my wife and mother
managed to get in.”
After the sentence, 26-year-old
Edelstein was surrounded by many
police officers who were about to
return him to the detention cell. On
the way out, he somehow managed
to push his head through the security
detail. He had one question for his
wife, who he had not seen for three
months, and who he would not see
again for years. And what was he
inspired to shout at that moment?
It was this: “Tanya, what candle is it
today?”
Russian security officials thought
the prisoner, who had just heard
his harsh sentence, was going mad.
The truth was that, for the first time,
his wife thought so too. She didn’t
understand what he was talking
about. So again he shouted, “What
candle is it today?” Only after his
third attempt did she understand and
immediately shout back, “Tonight we
light the second candle!” Yes, it was
the Sunday morning of Chanukah
5745. Yuli Edelstein did not have a
calendar in the dungeon, but as he was
sentenced, he heard the secular date
and calculated that this must be the
time for Chanukah. It was important
for him to know how many candles to
light.
That evening, not in a prisoner’s
dungeon, but in a cell of prisoners
already tried, prisoner Yuli Edelstein, a
member of an assimilated family who
discovered Judaism and repented,
somehow got a hold of two matches.
He stood in front of the bars in the
window and lit the two matches “And
so,” he told the younger students in
Beitar-Illit, “I stood there in front
of the window for a few seconds
until the matches really scorched my
fingers. It was perhaps the shortest
candle lit in history. I don’t even know
if I fulfilled the mitzvah, but for me,
that night, a little light rejected a lot of
darkness.”
