Havering council is sending a truly chilling message by cancelling Hannukah

THE sky was rarely darker than on a moonless night in Theresienstadt.

- Jack Kessler

Of the 140,000 Czech Jews imprisoned in the concentration camp-ghetto in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, a quarter died of disease or starvation. The rest were carted away, murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau and other death camps in the East. Yet even in Theresienstadt, there was Hanukkah.

In May 1942, the modernist sculptor and architect Arnold Zadikow was rounded up with his family and deported to the prison camp. He was put to work in the Lautsch Workshop, which produced decorative arts for the Nazis. With the help of a young woodcarver, Leopold Hecht, who stole a block of wood from the Germans, they created a Hanukkiah with nine candles and a Star of David. The inscription in Hebrew read, "Who is like you, O Lord, among the celestials?" This was no exception. The festival of lights was celebrated in the Lodz ghetto in Poland, the Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands and by a young Jewish boy on a bridge while being transferred between concentration camps in Romania. Where it will not be celebrated this year in the traditional manner is in Havering.

The council has cancelled plans to light Hanukkah candles outside its town hall, suggesting this would "risk further inflaming tensions within our communities".