Hanukkah, the Jewish holiday period known as...

Hanukkah, the Jewish holiday period known as the festival of lights, starts at sundown tonight and ends Dec.11.

Religious freedom is the theme struck most often at Hanukkah because it commemorates the 165 BC victory of Jews over a Greco-Syrian empire and the rededication of the Jerusalem Temple.

Observant Jews are not required to skip work or school during the eight-day holiday and there are no special synagogue services, other than added readings.

A Los Angeles communitywide celebration will be held at 4:45 p.m. Monday at the Jewish Community Building, 6505 Wilshire Blvd. A large electric Hanukkah menorah will be lighted atop an adjacent parking structure.

Rabbi Joel Rembaum of Temple Beth Am will officiate, along with Wayne Feinstein, executive vice president of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles. Representatives of local Soviet Jewish, Ethiopian and Sephardic communities will also take part.

DATES

The 58th annual Our Lady of Guadalupe procession in East Los Angeles--a parade of parish groups and floats celebrating the apparitions of Mary reported in Mexico in 1531--will begin at noon Sunday in front of Our Lady of Solitude Church. It will wind its way to East Los Angeles College Stadium for a 2 p.m. Mass with Archbishop Roger M. Mahony as the main celebrant. About 12,000 people are expected at the stadium.

Sheik Jadul Haque of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, known as the Grand Imam in the Muslim world, will be the keynote speaker at the fourth biennial conference on the life example and teachings of the Prophet Mohammed organized by the Islamic Society of Orange County. The two-day conference at the Anaheim Hilton will begin Dec. 23. Other speakers include Imam Wallace Muhammad of the Chicago-based American Muslim Mission and Hasan Turabi, attorney general of Sudan. The Islamic Society of Orange County, whose mosque, or masjid , is in Garden Grove, represents about 20,000 Muslims, according to Muzammil Siddiqi, the society’s director.

CONGREGATIONS

East Los Angeles’ Bella Vista Church of the Brethren will be one of four churches featured on NBC-TV’s Christmas Day religious special, “An American Christmas.” The 75-member congregation, pastored by the Rev. Gilbert Romero Jr., is racially and ethnically mixed and has an outreach to drug abusers and prison inmates. Television taping at the church will be on Dec. 18. The four churches to be shown on the Dec. 25 telecast, including Old South Church in Boston, were selected by NBC and officials of the National Council of Churches.