Yellow Candle 2021 – let’s prepare to remember together on Yom HaShoah
IN 1949, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel instituted an annual memorial for the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust. Since then, Yom HaShoah has been a solemn day for Jewish communities around the world to ensure the horrors of the Holocaust are never forgotten. Across the UK, schools, synagogues, charities and institutions come together to mark Yom HaShoah every year as a day of remembrance and commemoration. The Yellow Candle initiative co-ordinated by Maccabi GB has become a focal point of our community’s remembrance, together with the national commemoration event run each year by Yom HaShoah UK.
WHAT IS YELLOW CANDLE UK?
The concept behind the Yellow Candle project is simple — each year, in advance of Yom HaShoah, thousands of yellow memorial candles are distributed across the community, to be lit as an act of communal remembrance. Using the database of the Yad Vashem archives, each candle comes with an individual information card, including the name, age, and hometown of someone who perished in the Holocaust.
In the five years since the project was launched in the UK, more than 100,000 Yellow Candles have been distributed and lighting a Yellow Candle has become synonymous with commemorating Yom HaShoah.
With more than 250 cross-communal organisations, schools and synagogues participating, Yellow Candle UK has become the centrepiece of Holocaust remembrance in the British Jewish community.
On the eve of Yom HaShoah 2020 #yellowcandle was trending on Twitter, with more than 540,000 people viewing Yom HaShoah UK’s national commemoration ceremony online.
The Maccabi movement was founded in the late 19th century as a response to growing antisemitism in Europe, with direct involvement in resistance movements during the Holocaust. Maccabi has traditionally played a role in providing Jewish people with the safe spaces to thrive as a community and the Yellow Candle project represents this legacy.
Despite the challenges of the pandemic, Maccabi GB has been determined that Yellow Candle will continue in 2021. Pressing pause is not an option. Remembrance is our duty, not only to honour those who perished but also to honour the survivors who have done so much to ensure ‘never forget’ is a reality and not only a slogan.
Over the past six months, Maccabi GB has had to review its distribution plan to ensure the Yellow Candle project could still happen. To abide by Government guidelines on social distancing and lockdown restrictions, all candles are being posted directly to each household. While we will aim to return to volunteer deliveries and pickup points in future years, posting the Yellow Candles represents the most secure, safe way of distribution.
To ensure that Yellow Candles can be lit in homes across the Jewish community, Genesis Philanthropy Group (GPG) has come on board as a supporter of the project and is subsidising the costs of postage and packaging. This means we are now able to send yellow candles directly to anyone who orders online at yellowcandleuk.org.
For £3.75, you can have a yellow candle delivered to your door in time for Yom HaShoah, which begins on the evening of Wednesday April 7.
Funding from GPG and from our other supporters including the Betty Messenger Charitable Foundation, The Charles Wolfson Charitable Trust, the charity We Are All Making A Difference and Yom HaShoah UK is enabling Yellow Candle to continue in 2021 and beyond, and also widen its reach. We are calling on the entire community to support the project and to order their Yellow Candles as soon as possible to ensure they will be delivered by April 7.
Educational resources for all ages are also available on the Yellow Candle website, so that families and educators can take the opportunity of lighting a candle to teach children of all ages about the significance of Yom HaShoah and the importance of remembrance.
Yom HaShoah UK will again be running a national commemoration ceremony online. The ceremony will take place at the start of Yom HaShoah (the evening of Wednesday April 7, at 7.30pm) and will include time for lighting Yellow Candles.
Our whole community will be able to join this collective act of remembrance.
Commemorating the lives of individuals, with their names, their ages, their homes, is a powerful way of remembering the devastating impact of the crimes of the Holocaust. Each death represents the destruction of an entire world, that can never be forgotten.
Pressing pause is not an option. Remembrance is our duty’