Poetry in lights: A Hanukkah photo essay
Poetry in lights: A Hanukkah photo essay

These photographic Hanukkah reflections are a gate to the multitude of memories and associations that can arise as we look at the lit menorah during the half hour after the candle lighting each night of the holiday.

The art film is dedicated to the memory of my grandfathers, Abram Elovich and Eliahu Bujanover. Both of them were engineers at the top of their profession.. 

Both my grandfathers were strong, sharp-minded people and Jews entirely devoted to our people and its legacy and traditions, even under the anti-Jewish tyranny of the Soviet regime.

Abram Elovich was the son of devoted Zionists, and was instrumental during the WWII in the process of inventing and producing special anti-tank steel for the Soviet Army while evacuated to the Ural Mountains. He was one of the pioneering steel inventors and engineers in the Soviet Union, a member of a special family of hard-working Soviet Jewish engineers and scientists. His brother Solomon Elovich was a 'secret' top nuclear physicist working in Moscow, one of the five-member strong team dispatched by the USSR to Hiroshima and Nagasaki within an hour after the nuclear explosion, to research its consequences, at the risk of their own lives, as ordered by the Kremlin regime. Solomon Elovich calculated the date of his imminent death as a result of that mission with precision, and died on August 7th, 1946, exactly a year after their mission started. The mission is top-secret in Russia still.

Eliahu Bujanover was from an observant Jewish family who took special care to provide the best possible education to their five sons who all became esteemed engineers and scientists. Eliahu was deputy director of a large electronic plant in the USSR and fought bravely during WWII. His brother Solomon Bujanover was an outstanding and also top-secret Soviet military scientist,  the father of the system  that is known as 'precision bombing' which was crucial at the later stages of WWII for the Soviet army campaign against the Nazis, and for many other essential military engineering systems. 

Eliahu's other brother Simcha Bujanover lived in Switzerland, Berlin and Paris and was an outstanding physician and author of many medical books which are still in use today. He was married to Eleonore Rose, the niece of Gustav Mahler and prominent member of the famous Austrian Rose musical dynasty. 

May their memory be for a blessing and may the light of Jewish strength continue to grow.