YOU CAN’T argue in
favour of taking risks with fire. Yet there remains something odd about
Aberystwyth University suddenly telling hundreds of Jewish people from Europe’s
biggest Hasidic community in north London they can no longer rent the Pentre
Jane Morgan student village because they’re in the habit of lighting candles on
a Friday night.
The Stamford Hill
visitors have been coming to Aberystwyth and staying in university
accommodation and lighting candles on a Friday night every August for more than
20 years. Lighting candles – usually two – on a Friday night to welcome Shabbat
– the Jewish day of rest – is for them an indispensable ritual.
It was apparently
never regarded as a problem. Until last year, when the visitors were told
candles were out.
“Unfortunately,
last year there was more than one incident involving lit candles with this
visiting group,” the university said.This Jewish community, saddened at missing
its regular fortnight in Aberystwyth, suggested an answer - the candles could
be enclosed in glass holders, a practice followed in many Jewish households.
The university
said no. They had taken legal and health-and-safety advice.The university’s
reaction seems disproportionate. Candles are being lit all the time without
loss of life or property. All that’s necessary is for a little care to be
taken. How else are we supposed to manage during power-cuts?
Should churches
cluck worriedly and consign their antique candlesticks to locked chests never
to be used again? May we be assured there are no elegant silver candelabra
lurking in a cupboard at Plas Penglais, and that if there are they will never
again grace a dinner table presided over by a current or future vice-chancellor
?
Glass holders
would surely be an adequate safety measure.
If they are
considered good enough protection - as they are - for numerous ancient churches
and cathedrals, which are always lighting candles when hundreds of people are
present, why not for a student village in Aberystwyth - on a total of just two
Friday nights over a whole year?
Author: cambrian
Why can't those who want to just use electric lights? Shmiras Shabbos Kehilchosoh paskens that they're fine when necessary and R. Shlomo Zalman Auerbach is cited as agreeing that a brocho can be made on battery (as opposed to mains) powered lights. Of course people who follow different shitos are entitled to do so but it's a bit odd that this doesn't even seem to have been considered as a possibility.
ReplyDeleteThere must be some other story about the candles.
ReplyDeleteMaybe they could have all lit candles in a nominated safe place and pay a goy to act as fire marshal?
I am sure they were lighting tens of candles with olive oil etc all over.
Sometimes its the yiden who are in the wrong although I can't judge in this case.
I have always been bothered by something else.
In the royal free hospital shabbos room there is a ban on lighting shabbos candles, yet in the hospital prayer room nearby they light (unsupervised) candles all the time.
surely that's discrimination??