Rav Yerachmiel Gorelik, a Chabad shaliach in the Siberian city of Tyumen, was interviewed last week on the first night of Chanukah by Israel’s Channel 13 News about the giant ice menorah he commissioned for Chanukah.
The menorah is 13 feet tall, bigger than a similar ice menorah commissioned by the Chabad shaliach in the Siberian city of Tomsk, which is a “mere” ten feet tall.
Dozens of workers in Tyumen toiled for two and a half days before Chanukah to build the giant menorah, using water instead of glue in the freezing Siberian cold. The menorah is formed out of blocks of ice, each weighing 264 pounds, and the menorah itself weighs 2.5 tons.
No one would have imagined the television interview’s unlikely ending, which Rav Gorelik shared with Channel 13 this week. “On Friday afternoon, I received a telephone call from the most senior Protestant priest here in Tyumen,” he said. “He heard from friends in Israel about the ice menorah, which they saw on the television interview, and he decided that he must see it.”
“He came the next day. He kissed the menorah and told me: ‘It’s also mine! I’m also a Jew! My grandmother from my mother’s side was a Jew.'”
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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5 Responses
OMG!
Nebuch!
Interesting story. I’m sorry for being picayune but clarification would be nice. There’s no such thing as a Protestant priest. Priests are Raman Catholic. Was this man Roman Catholic or Protestant?
so maybe he will put on tephilin?
What kind of protestants have priests? And “the most senior Protestant priest here in Tyumen”?! It would be a wonder if there was one there, but to have a “most senior” there must be at least two! That seems to me extremely unlikely. How many protestants are there in all of Russia, let alone in this one town in Siberia?
I wonder if something has gone seriously wrong in translation, and what he really said was “Pravoslav”. That would make the story make sense.