REGINA -- The Festival of Lights, also known as Hanukkah, started Thursday, but the celebration will look very different for Yaniv and Sapir Atiya due to COVID-19.
“It's a very Jewish thing to host people like hospitality stuff like that. It's a big thing and usually we would have people coming over to our place to light candles or we would go to their place,” Yaniv said. “This year, unfortunately I don't think it's going to happen at all.”
The Atiya family has lived in Saskatchewan for the past five years, originally coming from Israel.
This year, festivities that normally would mean celebrating their community will be focused on their family.
“It lasts for eight days, each day we light one more candle and we eat a lot of fried food because it’s going back to the miracle of the jar of oil in the temple,” Yaniv said.
Rabbi Avrohom Simmonds with the Chabad Jewish Centre and his family are trying to keep their celebrations as normal as possible, giving his children the opportunity to light the menorah and playing dreidel.
“We have a personal long-standing tradition in our family that my mother reads a Hanukkah story to the grandchildren every night of Hanukkah, and she’ll call us each night and read us a story,” said Simmonds.
As many people want to get together and celebrate Hanukkah, some are looking at this as an opportunity to connect in a different way.
“Instead of focusing on the negative and the pandemic, we can focus on the fact that we can now see everybody if we want to and share the whole process online. There's nothing to stop us from doing this,” said Jeremy Parnes, the Rabbi at Beth Jacob Synagogue. “And in fact, maybe connect with people that other years we don't connect with because we focus on just seeing each other.”
One way to mark Hannukah that will go ahead in Regina is the lighting of a public menorah in the Conexus Arts Centre parking lot on Tuesday night.
