100-year-old Holocaust Survivor To Light Chanukah Menorah Saturday Night In Columbus Ohio

Weinrib has been meeting with students at Olentangy Liberty High School to share the lessons of his six years in ten concentration camps as a young man.

View Slideshow. Tom Dodge. Abe Weinrib holds a bowl from Olentangy Liberty... Photo: Dispatch.com

(COLUMBUS) - The festive menorah lighting to mark the beginning of Chanukah on Saturday evening, December 8, at Easton Town Center in Columbus, Ohio at 8:00 pm will be bittersweet for Columbus resident Abe Weinrib.

A survivor of the notorious death camps of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Weinrib will remember all he lost during the dark years of the Nazi reign at the same time that he celebrates his 100th birthday on Chanukah.

Rabbi Areyah Kaltmann, of the Lori Schottenstein Chabad Center, says, “Abe represents the indomitable Jewish spirit that refuses to be extinguished and the continuing rededication that is the very theme of Chanukah.

Abe’s lighting of the first candle of the holiday symbolizes hope and conviction, and it is the ultimate triumph of beginning the next century of his life.”

Kaltmann says, “As a young man, Abe could not have imagined the horror that would befall his family and his people. And in the throes of those years of darkness he never could have imagined the luminous moment we will all experience with him this Saturday night.”

For a number of years Weinrib has been meeting with students at Olentangy Liberty High School to share the lessons of his six years in ten concentration camps as a young man.

The students in the interdisciplinary studies class have embraced Weinrib and his perspectives on the importance of tolerance and kindness as antidotes to hate and racism.

For more information contact: Ronn Torossian, 212-999-5585