Light Conquers Darkness of Hanukkah Vandalism

At 71, Victoria Monina remembers a childhood spent hiding from Nazi soldiers bent on sending to their deaths all the Jews they could find.

This week she remembered that bleak time all too vividly.

On Sunday morning, she gazed in shock at the charred tatters of the Happy Hanukkah flag she had hung outside her home in Thousand Oaks. Overnight, someone had burned it.

“I lost it,” she said in her Greek-inflected English as friends and family members gathered at her house Tuesday afternoon. “I’m a Holocaust survivor. My husband was in the camps. Sixty-four of my family members died in the Holocaust.”

Before a small crowd in her driveway, Monina mounted a stepladder and hung a new Hanukkah banner. With the help of Rabbi Moshe Bryski, she turned on each bulb of a 6-foot-tall electric menorah lent to her for the duration of the holiday season by the rabbi’s religious organization, Chabad of the Conejo.

“We’re going to make sure you have the happiest Hanukkah ever,” Bryski told her. “This will be the most joyous holiday yet.”

Emigrating from Greece to the U.S. in 1951, Monina settled in Philadelphia.

She moved to California a few years ago to be closer to her children and grandchildren.

In all her time in this country, she said, she has encountered no anti-Semitism until now.

“I wanted to do something about it,” she said. “I didn’t want to keep it a secret. I wanted to leave the flag hanging so everyone could see what happened.”

Ventura County sheriff’s deputies removed the banner as evidence Monday.

Meanwhile, neighbors came over -- one cheering Monina up with a box of chocolates, others simply bearing condolences.

On Tuesday, Leora Langberg offered Monina a big bouquet.

“I just wanted to show her that we stand with her,” said Langberg, board president of the Conejo Jewish Day School in Agoura Hills.

Monina’s fellow students from a weekly Bible class led by Bryski also came by in a show of support.

The class involves a word-by-word examination of the Old Testament, a study so detailed that the class has plunged into Exodus, the Bible’s second book, only after 11 years.

“I just recently started to study Judaism,” Monina said. “It’s something I never got to do when I was growing up.”

In Greece, some 80% of the Jewish community was exterminated during World War II, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Monina survived with the help of Christians who hid her in their homes.

At her house Tuesday, the crowd sang a couple of Hanukkah songs after she tearfully lighted her driveway menorah.

Then they launched into “God Bless America.”

Afterward, Monina, who works part time at a bakery, circulated with a platter of jelly doughnuts -- an apt gesture for a holiday intended, after all, to be festive.

“The whole meaning of Hanukkah is light over darkness,” Bryski said. “One individual decided to bring darkness here, but we won’t allow it. We won’t stand for it.”