When the Russia-Ukraine war began in 2014, the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol saw heavy fighting; when the frontlines stabilized, it found itself just behind them—and its denizens soon grew accustomed to the sound of sporadic artillery fire. This year, Russian forces destroyed Mariupol almost completely. Dovid Margolin writes:
Gone is the city’s theater, where some 300 people were killed in an airstrike in May. Homes, stores, hotels, and parks have likewise disappeared—they, like the streets they once lined, turned to rubble. Mariupol’s lone synagogue was not spared either. Only the facade remains.
But on Saturday evening, workers pulled something out of the debris: the large metal Chanukah menorah that had once graced the synagogue sanctuary. It had somehow survived the intense fires that destroyed the building and was recovered a day before Hanukkah.
“There’s a sense of great emotion in our community,” says Rabbi Mendel Cohen, director of Chabad-Lubavitch of Mariupol and the city’s only rabbi since 2005. “The overall feeling is that we are witnessing the idea that ‘a little light dispels much darkness.’”
For years, Cohen’s synagogue had operated out of his modest Jewish community center in Mariupol. Sometime before the war, as Jewish life in the seaside city continued expanding, the rabbi sought bigger premises and rented a large space for a synagogue in a solid building on Prospect Mira in the city center, using the old building for storage and limited programming. Both buildings were destroyed.
Read more on Chabad.org: https://www.chabad.org/news/article_cdo/aid/5745181/jewish/In-Decimated-Mariupol-Menorah-Emerges-From-the-Rubble.htm