Here’s My Story: The Mayor and the Menorah

Rabbi Shmuel Butman

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In 1977, I had been working at the Lubavitch Youth Organization, which oversees Chabad’s outreach work in the New York area, for a little over ten years.

By then, a handful of cities around America had started to have public Chanukah menorah lightings, and we figured that New York deserved to have one too.

So, that Chanukah, Mayor Abraham Beame gave us permission to put up a public menorah on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue.

People soon complained: “If the Lubavitchers want to put up a menorah, let them do it on Eastern Parkway!” But as Mayor Beame joked, since neither of us is very tall, “Rabbi Butman and I saw eye-to-eye.” He was such a warm Jew that he even came to light the menorah himself. One night that first year, after the lighting, the Rebbe’s wife, Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka, came to see the menorah for herself.

Since then, every mayor of New York City has helped light the menorah, along with many governors, senators, and other dignitaries. If the mayor was Jewish, they would light the whole menorah, and if not, they would light the shamash, the central flame from which the rest of the menorah is lit.

Later, when people protested the participation of government officials at these religious ceremonies, the Rebbe pointed to state Attorney General Robert Abrams’ presence at the lighting: If the attorney general, who is the custodian of law and order in New York, himself lit the menorah, then he clearly believes that it isn’t a legal issue!

Now, in general, the Rebbe stayed away from politics, and the Rebbe’s secretary, Rabbi Hodakov told us to be careful not to invite politicians who don’t hold office. As he explained, “If you invite someone who holds office, you’re honoring the position, not the individual.” However, if you honor a person who is running for mayor or city comptroller, you can’t say you’re honoring the office, because they don’t have an office. Instead, you are honoring the politician, and you are taking sides by associating with them rather than their opponent.

Over the years, it wasn’t always easy to stay away from politicians while they were campaigning because I knew some of them personally, and sometimes they would ask to appear at the lighting.

One year, the Parks Commissioner — who was not too friendly to Jews, to say the least — called up the then mayor Ed Koch. “Why do they need Fifth Avenue every year?” he complained.

When Koch agreed to support his commissioner to have us moved, we began planning to launch a campaign against the mayor. We would go to the press, and argue that if non-Jews celebrating their festivities could stay, then the Jews shouldn’t have to wander about from place to place — but first we asked the Rebbe.

“Don’t you know,” answered the Rebbe, “that one doesn’t go to war with Koch?”

At that point, the only thing left for us to do was to meet with the Parks Commissioner, and so I went to his office together with Rabbi Dovid Raskin, and after a long conversation, he conceded that we could return: “But for one year, you gotta leave.” Instead of Fifth Avenue, he gave us a spot nearby on 59th Street for that year. The next year, he was fired, and we returned to our original spot. As a result of the Rebbe’s advice, we continued to get on quite well with Mayor Koch. He could be very helpful and cooperative on some issues, but once he had already made a decision, you couldn’t move him.

Sometime after that, when Chabad in S. Louis, Missouri, was promoting its public menorah lighting, there was strong opposition from the local Jewish community leadership, and the Federation there wound up divided on the issue.

At one point, Ed Koch came to speak for the S. Louis United Jewish Appeal, and during the question-and-answer period, a woman asked him to weigh in on the controversy: “As you know, Mr. Mayor, some of us are not happy with allowing a public menorah lighting to take place,” she said.

“What’s wrong with a public lighting?” asked Koch, to applause from the crowd. “In my city, we have the world’s largest menorah, and I lit it!”

In the 1980s, we spoke to Yaakov Agam, who is one of the most famous living Jewish artists today, about making his own design of the menorah. After working on it for some time, he sent a miniature model of his menorah, which at full scale would be the largest in the world. “Can this work?” he wanted to know.
Now, in a sense, the Rebbe revolutionized the modern look of the menorah. Before the 1980s, the branches of any menorah would almost always be half-round. The Rebbe was the one who pointed out that in Maimonides’ depiction of the menorah that stood in the Temple, which can be found in his Halachic work Mishneh Torah, the branches are actually straight. In addition, the biblical commentary Rashi also held that the branches of the menorah were “b’alachson,” which means that they extended out in a slanted line.

Yaakov Agam’s menorah looked very nice, and the branches were slanted, but it didn’t look exactly like the temple menorah, which had a distinct middle branch, so we weren’t sure if it would work. We sent the model to the Rebbe, and after it sat on the Rebbe’s desk for three days, we received a reply:

“You have to give him a chance to make his own interpretation of the menorah,” said the Rebbe. After all, if we just had a menorah the way it was in the temple, then where would we see Agam’s artistic design? This way, we were able to have a menorah inspired by Maimonides’ description, as well as by Yaakov Agam’s personal touch.

Afterwards, when Agam came to meet the Rebbe one Sunday, as he was distributing dollars for charity, the Rebbe thanked him personally for the design. Whenever Agam is in New York for Chanukah, he is proud to come and light his menorah, and in other years, his son lights it in his place.

The menorah became a real attraction. One year, a certain Jew from Chicago was visiting New York and convinced his family to come along to see the world’s largest menorah.

That year, the last day of the holiday was on Wednesday. We had done a public lighting on Tuesday evening and then — because the Rebbe had once told us to light the menorah in the morning, as well — lit it again at 7:00 AM. But later that morning, by mistake, the crane we had contracted to come to take the menorah down on Thursday came a day early. So, when this family headed out from their hotel that afternoon to go to Fifth Avenue, lo and behold, there was no menorah.

This man had promised his wife that they would see the world’s largest menorah, and now he had egg on his face. Feeling frustrated, he went back to his hotel and fired off a letter to the Rebbe: “Dear Rabbi Schneerson, I came to see your menorah, but it was not there!”

The Rebbe then sent out this letter to us, along with a big question mark. So we wrote this man a very nice letter — as well as a copy to the Rebbe, which he approved — thanking him for bringing this mistake to our attention and committing, in the future, that the menorah would stay up for the entire Chanukah.

Rabbi Shmuel Butman was the longtime director of the Lubavitch Youth Organization in New York until his passing in July of 2024. He was interviewed in December 2011 and January 2012.