NICK ROBINSON: Why I lit candles for the first time this Chanukah

I confess, I had to search out how to do it on YouTube. You see, I’ve never lit Chanukah candles before and didn’t know how to do it. We never had them in my house before.

Yes, my mother is Jewish and so, as my Jewish friends always tell me, that means I am too. However, that’s not how I was brought up. My Mum married out. Dad was CofE (lapsed). They sent me to the local church primary school. I’ve never “done God” (as Alastair Campbell used to put it dismissively). My wife is Catholic and will be singing hymns in the church choir this Christmas Eve as I help hand out the hymn books and service sheets.

So why did I light candles this year ? The short answer is because Rabbi Mendy Korer gave me them at the Islington community Chanukah festival last Sunday. I had just interviewed a family about how they felt about the Bondi beach massacre. What they said moved me to tears. I know news reporters are meant to harden themselves but they got me unawares. I asked whether they felt safe. They didn’t. It was, they agreed, a matter of when, not if, there would be an attack like the one in Australia.

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That didn’t shock me. It was what they said next which did.

Grandma thought it might be time to leave, I was told. Where was she from, I asked, assuming the answer would be Poland or Hungary or Germany and that she was a refugee from the Holocaust. Oh no, I was told, she was born here. That was what did it.

I thought of my grandma Suzi, who had to leave the country she grew up believing was home. She and her husband Bernhard fled Berlin in October 1933. Never again, we always say. Yet here were Brits like me who believed maybe – just maybe – it would happen again.

So, I lit the candles for them and for my many Jewish friends who’ve told me of the fear and anger they’ve felt these past two years. And I lit them for Suzi and Bernhard Rosenberg, whose story I’ve just started to research. Last week I was sent a copy of the Nazi document seizing their bank account, signed “Heil Hitler”.

Aware I have four more times followers than the Jewish population of Britain, I thought I should explain to those who do not have any Jewish family or friends what these events would mean to those that did

That morning I’d tweeted to my million followers on X about the horror in Australia. I wrote about the “terrible echoes of the massacres on 7 October”. I added that “For Jews living here it will feel painfully close to the murders at a synagogue in Manchester.  It is a reminder – if one was needed – that Jews all over the world now live in fear.”

Aware that I have four more times followers than the Jewish population of Britain, I thought I should find a way to explain to those who do not have any Jewish family or friends what these events would mean to those that did. At the time I wrote it, some media outlets were reporting the story as a gun attack and not a massacre of Jews. So I invited people to remember “the impact on the Muslim and, indeed, the wider community of the Christchurch mosque attack in New Zealand.”

For that one sentence I was abused for lazy virtue signalling and an attempt to equalise the suffering of Muslims and Jews.

Maybe it was a thought too soon,  a sub clause too many from “that man who works at the BBC”, at a time most Jews were feeling fear and rage. Maybe.

The final reason I lit the candles is in the hope that this Chanukah there can be light as well as heat in our national debate. I think that’s what Grandma would have wanted.