Running a vigil

Silence is the method here, and holding it is the whole difficulty.

No communal body has to authorise this, and that is not the same as telling nobody. In a British city the shul board, the representative council and community security will all hear about it, and they would rather hear it from you first. Twenty people outside a shul on a Tuesday evening is a vigil, and the person who called it was a member of the congregation last week.

Being uneasy about standing at the front is the ordinary response, not a sign you are the wrong person.

Read this part before you book anything. A vigil and a demonstration want opposite things from a crowd. One asks people to stand still and feel something together. The other asks them to project. Run the first with the tools of the second and you get neither, so almost every decision below is about keeping the two apart.

Three events with one name

They are not interchangeable and running them the same way fails.

The vigil	What it is actually for	What kills it
A long campaign, where the demand outlasts the news	Keeping it visible week after week	Sameness. Change one element weekly or it thins out. And check the demand is still live: a vigil for something already resolved reads as nobody having noticed.
After an attack	Giving a shocked community somewhere to stand	Speeches. People came to be near each other, not to be addressed
A yahrzeit	Marking a date that belongs to a bereaved family	Anybody using the date to make a wider point

Open a Jewish calendar before you pick a date

This is the decision that quietly excludes people, and it is made in ten minutes.

Nothing runs from candle lighting on Friday until nightfall on Saturday. Observant people cannot drive to it, carry a candle to it, or hear a microphone.

Motzei Shabbat works. In a northern summer it means starting close to ten at night, which rules out the children.

Festivals carry the same restrictions, and the second days are what catch organisers out. During the Three Weeks a vigil sits naturally, and live music does not. If a family is sitting shiva, ask them once whether they want a public event at all, and take the answer you are given.

A yahrzeit follows the Hebrew date. That date moves against the English one every year. Ask the family for it. Do not work from the anniversary printed in a newspaper.

Is there a minyan, and who is counting?

Decide this before you publicise, not on the night.

If mourner’s kaddish is going to be said, ten Jewish adults are needed, and who counts towards ten differs between communities. Ask whoever will lead it.

Then give one person the single job of counting. Have them count before anything is announced.

Where there is no minyan, say so in the publicity and offer a psalm instead. Nothing is lost by it.

Most of the crowd will not know the words either way. So somebody says what is about to happen before it happens.

“We’re going to say a psalm now. You don’t need to know it and you don’t need to join in. Standing there is enough.”

If you close on Acheinu or Hatikvah, understand that you have chosen the ending, and that people will applaud after it. Decide whether you want that.

Reading the names

One form, identical for every name, decided in advance. A name and an age is enough.

The moment one name gets a sentence of description, every name after it needs one too. Forty minutes later you are in the middle of a eulogy nobody planned.

Readers hand over without commentary. For a local name, ask the family first. For a national list, use the wording the family or the campaign has already published.

Give one person authority to change the text. Status changes, sometimes during the event itself. A crowd finding that out from a phone in the third row is the worst version of it.

Two speakers, and what you tell them

Written brief, sent in advance, not explained on the pavement.

“Three minutes, and I’ll stand up when you reach it. It’s a vigil, so nothing political from the front, no thanking people, and please don’t ask anyone to clap.”

“I’ve got two speakers and I’m holding to it. Would you read three of the names instead? That’s the part people remember.”

When somebody tries to turn it into a rally

Ten seconds decides this.

A chant the crowd takes up has already changed the event. So the response goes over the top of it at once, quietly, from the microphone.

“We’re not doing that tonight. Stay with us. This is a vigil.”

Then move straight into the next fixed element, because a crowd will follow structure back. Do not argue with the person, and do not let a steward argue with them either.

Flags and placards are your call, and both answers work. Publish whichever you choose alongside the time, so nobody arrives holding something they are then asked to put down.

“Bring a candle. No flags and no placards tonight. That isn’t a political point, it’s what keeps this a vigil.”

If a counter-protest arrives across the road, your crowd faces inward. One instruction, given once: nobody engages and nobody films them.

Candles, weather, children

Assume open flames are refused. Councils, synagogues, schools and universities almost all say no, and wax on a war memorial is a repair bill and a story. Battery candles photograph better in rain in any case.

Forty minutes of standing in heavy rain is not achievable, so write the short running order now: one speaker, the names, the silence. Use it without apologising for it.

Children come to these, and children hear the names. Where the names include children, say so in the publicity so parents can decide. Put anything involving them early rather than at the end.

Who has to be told

The site owner or the council. The synagogue, if the ground is theirs. Your community security organisation, where one exists locally, with a realistic number, updated the moment that number triples.

Ask the site owner early whether they want proof of insurance and their own risk assessment form. They usually do, and neither can be produced on the day. For readers in England and Wales that is what the venue asks for.

Whether the police have to be notified depends on where you are standing, and this page will not guess at it. Work through how to find out the law where you are once, and the answer covers everything you run afterwards.

Assume the whole thing is recorded. That is why the speakers’ words exist on paper before the day.

Nothing said at a vigil is off the record. And capturing evidence is what you want if something happens at the edge of the crowd.

What holding the line costs you

Refusing chants and flags reads to some of the people standing there as timidity. A few of them will not come back.

That cost is real and at a vigil it is worth paying. It is not worth paying at a rally, which is a different event, and you can call one of those in a different week.

The other cost is repetition. A weekly vigil with an unchanged running order thins out, in our experience after about a month, though we have not measured it.

Change one element each week. A different reader, a different psalm, a different corner of the same square.

Before you name a date

Two questions, answered from memory, and if either is a blank you are not ready to publicise.

When does Shabbat come out in your town on the Saturday you had in mind? And who is counting the minyan?

Then write the two lines. The second one is what decides whether the first happens.

If it is Sunday 9 August and the children are in bed, then I will open the Jewish calendar and write three possible dates with their nightfall times next to them.

If [the likeliest obstacle: the shul says no, the family says not yet, only four people reply], then I will [your pre-written response to it].