Every year, in the days before Yom HaShoah, members of Beth Tzedec’s Men’s Club deliver yellow yahrzeit candles to the doors of Jewish homes across our neighbourhood. Beth Tzedec helped found this practice. It is now observed by Jewish communities around the world.

The candle arrives in a yellow bag. On the bag: the word JUDE. A Magen David wrapped in barbed wire.

The symbolism is intentional and exact. Yellow — the colour the Nazis forced Jews to wear as a badge of humiliation. Jude — the label of dehumanization. Barbed wire — the camps. All of it reclaimed, transformed, repurposed into an act of memory and defiance. The same bag, the same candle, every year. We had pictured it in our weekly newsletter before the delivery went out.

This year, residents called the police.

Not one or two. Several. Jewish residents who came home, saw the yellow bag at their door — and didn’t register the newsletter they had read days before. They saw JUDE. They saw the barbed wire. And their minds went somewhere completely rational and completely devastating: Is someone marking me? Is someone telling me I should be afraid to be a Jew in my own home?

A bag designed to reclaim the symbols of our persecution was received as evidence that the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)