Jewish people around the world are preparing to mark Hanukkah later this month
Rabbi Avrohom Kievman has led his Chabad-Lubavitch centre for over 30 years(Image: Liverpool Echo)
Growing up surrounded by the bright lights and bustling streets of New York, Rabbi Avrohom Kievman, 58, swapped the States for Liverpool in 1992 in order to share his religious teachings with a new community. Having worked as a rabbi in the US before making the move to the UK in the early 1990s, Rabbi Avrohom settled in the Allerton area of the city with his wife Golda, and later their family of eight children; Mendel, Yisrolik, Moussia, Sheina, Shmuel, Toba, Zalmon and Gavriel.
Part of the Chabad Lubavitch, which is a Jewish Orthadox movement, Rabbi Avrohom is one of thousands of emissaries who provide Jewish teachings, community services and outreach to all people of the Jewish faith within their local area. The movement aims to add the three key principles of wisdom, comprehension and knowledge into the way people live their lives. The decision on where Chabad Lubavitch emissaries should set up a centre is based on a number of factors, usually including whether a specific area is lacking a Jewish outreach.
Around the world there are thousands of Chabad Lubavitch centres, where Rabbis like Avrohom share Jewish teachings. Since the early 1990s Rabbi Avrohom and his wife Golda have run a packed schedule of classes and other services from their Beech Lane centre in the south of the city.
Rabbi Avrohom runs classes every day of the week from his south Liverpool centre (Image: Liverpool Echo)
Rabbi Avrohom told the ECHO: “Now we’re coming up to Hanukkah so it’s quite busy getting ready for that. But, in a typical week, we have a Sunday school, we have classes on Monday, we have a women’s class, Thursday night we have a men’s class and on a Tuesday afternoon we have a class for teenagers.
“Then, throughout the week, a lot of my time is spent on one-to-one studying with people, meeting people, counselling people of all ages. People are very interested and want to get back to their heritage and study their background, we study anything from the bible to mysticism.”
He continued: “The most rewarding part is to see the joy on people’s faces, when they study, learn and understand. There is also our social arm, where we help people. Right now, for Hanukkah, we raise funds for gifts for families and children, who wouldn’t have [them] otherwise.”
Away from running his Chabad Lubavitch centre, he also lends his time to various other roles within the community.
He said: “I’m not a Rabbi of any particular synagogue, but at the moment I’m temping at Childwall synagogue, because they don’t have a rabbi, so I’ve been there a little while and I help them. I’m not bound to any particular synagogue, but my clientele, if you will, is the entire Merseyside Jewish community.”
The Rabbi shared an important message ahead of Hanukkah (Image: Liverpool Echo)
As Hanukkah quickly approaches, the Jewish festival is usually a time were families and friends get together to exchange gifts and celebrate, but this year is likely to carry a somewhat sombre set of emotions for many in the community, amid a significant number of hate crimes and attacks against Jewish people that have occurred in the last 12 months.
With the festival set to commence on December 14 and run until December 22, Rabbi Avrohom shared his own message to the Jewish community. He said: “The message of Hanukkah is that the darkness and the cold can be illuminated and therefore has to be illuminated. We shouldn’t become despondent from what we may perhaps see as the darkness around us like hate crimes and terrorist attacks.”
Furthering his message to Jewish people, he used the eight candles of the Jewish menorah, which represents each night of Hanukkah, to express how the festival can be a chance for Jews to “illuminate the darkness” that has been created by recent attacks against the community.
Rabbi Avrohom reflected on how much the Jewish community has changed since his time living in Liverpool(Image: Liverpool Echo)
He added: “People get worried, and Hanukkah comes in the middle of that and that’s what we try and express to people, don’t worry, don’t let the darkness intimidate you, because one small candle can illuminate a lot of darkness, and that’s how we have to live our lives. We do another good deed, another act of kindness, that’s really a theme of the Jewish people, we continue doing the good things that we do.”
As the Rabbi looks back on his over three decades spent living in the city, he said that he has seen the number of Jewish people living in the area fall. He said: “In 30 years there’s been two changes, yes, it’s diminished with less numbers, but we have become a much stronger community, much more educated community, in some senses even stronger than before. So, the diminishing of numbers, really didn’t diminish the power of the community, I think it’s now stronger in their educational Jewish studies and learning and appreciation of it.”
Casting his mind towards the years ahead, Rabbi Avrohom set out his “main goal”. He said: “The future of Judaism is whether we are able to pass it on to the next generation, that’s why we’re still here after 3,500 years, because we were able to continue that continuity, so that’s the most important thing of all.”