Born in Philly, the Public Menorah Turns 50

by Dovid Margolin – chabad.org

On a cold Chanukah night in the winter of 1974, five Chabadniks schlepped a small wooden menorah onto Independence Mall in Philadelphia. They hadn’t done much advertising, but after a few hours of sharing the Chanukah spirit with passersby, they sang the blessings and kindled one candle on the menorah to mark the first night of the holiday.

So was born, 50 years ago, the public menorah. Today, the Chabad-Lubavitch movement erects some 15,000 giant Chanukah menorahs on public squares from Washington, D.C., to Vienna, to Melbourne.

“The entire idea of placing a menorah like this came directly from the Rebbe’s inspiration to light up the world,” said Rabbi Abraham Shemtov, director of Chabad of Philadelphia since 1962.

The Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, had launched a worldwide Chanukah awareness campaign just a year earlier, urging every Jewish home to kindle a Chanukah menorah, for children to have and light their own menorahs, and for people to encourage their friends and neighbors to do so as well.

“There is a special advantage in the mitzvah of the Chanukah lights,” the Rebbe explained at the farbrengen gathering held on Dec. 15, 1973 (20 Kislev, 5734), “for when a Jew kindles a menorah, literal light emanates from it and illuminates the street.”

In the months that followed the Rebbe’s call to action, Chabad activists placed ads in The New York Times, manufactured and distributed tens of thousands of tin menorahs and boxes of candles, and printed countless brochures detailing how to correctly light the menorah. “Every Little Flame Counts,” one brochure declared. “Now More Than Ever, Join Jews the World Over In Kindling Chanukah Lights!”

But the public menorah did not exist until Philadelphia’s wooden one was cobbled together. Shemtov made sure a camera was on hand to capture the moment, the image showing him and four young men posing with the menorah with Independence Hall in the background. The photo ran a week later in the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent. “Of course I sent it first to the Rebbe before I handed it out to the press,” Shemtov recalled recently.

“It wasn’t a big menorah, but it was exciting,” said Rabbi Dovid Golowinsky, who was program coordinator at Chabad of Philadelphia at the time and built the menorah. “The main thing is that it was done. Today, when I see menorahs everywhere, I go back to thinking about that seed. I’m proud to have been a part of it.”

City of Brotherly Love

It didn’t take long for that little wooden menorah to snowball into something larger. The next year, a pioneering Chabad rabbi in San Francisco named Chaim Itche Drizin teamed up with rock impresario Bill Graham to place a 25-foot Chanukah menorah in Union Square. The mahogany menorah showed that the sky—or rather the 20 cubit height detailed by Jewish law—was the limit for giant menorahs.

By 1976 Shemtov had a 25-foot steel menorah built and placed at Independence Hall, home of the Liberty Bell and the place where the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress in 1776 and the U.S. Constitution was drafted and ratified in 1789. The City of Brotherly Love was host that year to a host of programs marking the country’s 200th anniversary, and the Philadelphia menorah was made a formal participant in the city’s Bicentennial celebrations.

“Placing the menorah in Independence Mall by Lubavitch is symbolic of three things,” Shemtov told the Exponent. “First, Lubavitch, which is a town in Russia, [likewise] means ‘city of brotherly love.’ Second, Chanukah and the Liberty Bell are beacons of freedom. Third, and most important, the menorah represents the epitome of light dispelling the darkness of the world … .”

Nowadays, a Chabad rabbi seeking to put up a menorah has a host of vendors to choose from, giant menorahs available in all styles and sizes. But back then, remembered Rabbi Elchonon Lisbon, a Chabad emissary in Baltimore who was a part of the Chabad of Philadelphia team in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, one needed a connection in the steel business to have a giant menorah made. “The entire project took two weeks, but the actual building took three days,” Irving Weinstein of Corell Steel told the newspaper at the time. “We worked around the clock.”

Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo joined the Chanukah celebration in 1976, and in the next few years would prove a great ally of the public menorah. When, in 1979, the local branch of the ACLU attacked the Liberty Bell menorah, claiming it was a breach of the separation of church and state principle, Rizzo directed City Solicitor Sheldon L. Albert to respond unequivocally. Not only would the City of Philadelphia not order the removal of the menorah, Albert told the media, but “in fact, it will be bigger and brighter than ever.”

While the vast majority of the Jewish community welcomed Chabad’s public menorahs and the Jewish pride and light they fostered during the dark winter nights, the leadership of some segments of the organized Jewish community came out strongly against the menorah. Joining the ACLU in opposition around the country at the time were mostly liberal Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League, some local Jewish Community Relations Councils and the umbrella organization of the Reform movement.

That winter of 1979, Shemtov chose to respond to the ACLU’s ire with laughter—literally: He brought Jewish Philadelphia-raised comedian Joey Bishop (born Joseph Gottlieb) as the guest of honor. “Welcome to the Jewish Olympics,” Bishop called out to the joyous crowd from the top of the cherry picker. “This he didn’t tell me about,” he said, as he struggled to ignite the first candle on the giant menorah, gesturing towards the rabbi next to him in the cherry picker. “Speeches he told me about, but not this.”

Whatever local opposition there was to Chabad’s menorah in Philadelphia had dissipated by the mid-1980s. Elsewhere in the country, however, opponents deemed the effort to remove the menorah’s lights from the public eye important enough to file suit, culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in its favor.

The public menorah’s Jewish opponents—and they were almost all Jewish—claimed the display would threaten Jews by eroding the separation of church and state, and in this way be counter-productive.

“Had I received your letter years ago, when the practice started, I would have had a more difficult task defending it, for the simple reason that the expected positive results were then a matter of conjecture,” the Rebbe wrote to the Reform movement’s Dr. Joseph B. Glaser in 1978. “But now, after the practice and the results have been observed for a number of years, my task is an easy one, since the general acclaim and beneficial results have far exceeded our expectations. The fact is that countless Jews in all parts of the country have been impressed and inspired by the spirit of Chanukah which has been brought to them—to many for the first time.”

By now, many of Chabad’s erstwhile menorah opponents are sponsoring public Chanukah menorah displays of their own. Towards the end of his life, American Jewish Congress leader Arthur Hertzberg admitted he’d been on the wrong side of the battle. “We thought you should be a Jew at home and a citizen on the street,” he said. “The Rebbe thought that being a Jew on the street you would be a better Jew in your home; he was right and we were wrong.”

Cradle of Liberty

What started in Philadelphia, birthplace of American independence, and San Francisco, home of its counterculture, did not remain there. Chabad put up New York City’s first public menorah in 1977 outside the Plaza Hotel at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, and since 1986 the location has been home to the largest menorah in the world, designed by the sculptor Yaacov Agam.

The same year Shemtov brought Bishop to lighten the mood in Philadelphia, he spearheaded the erection of a public menorah in Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., where he represented the D.C.-based American Friends of Lubavitch. What better way to inaugurate it, the ambitious young Chabad rabbi thought to himself, than to invite the president of the United States himself to attend? With the help of White House domestic policy advisor Stuart Eizenstat that’s exactly what happened. On Dec. 17, 1979, the fourth night of Chanukah, President Jimmy Carter walked out of the White House and kindled the shamash, before Eizenstat’s young son recited the blessings and lit the menorah.

“I felt it was important for our country to practice its commitment to religious pluralism by lighting the menorah on U.S. Park Service land,” Carter told the Washington Post in 2020. “I hoped this would help elevate this Jewish holiday into one all Americans would recognize, and I am grateful this annual event has grown much larger over time.”

Later dubbed the National Menorah by Ronald Reagan, the menorah moved to the Ellipse in the late 1980s where it has been erected ever since. At the same time, the phenomenon did not remain in the United States. The 1980s saw the public menorah go up in Buenos Aires and London, Paris and Milan. With the fall of Communism these locations were joined by Berlin and Moscow. By this point one would be hard-pressed to find a city or country without a public menorah.

Lois Yampolsky has worked as the administrative assistant at the Chabad center on Castor Avenue in Philadelphia since 1982. A sprightly 80-year-old, the pink-haired Yampolsky has ever since helped prepare for the annual Liberty Bell menorah lighting and event, calling vendors, filing for permits, and liaising with city officials.

Though much has changed since Shemtov first hired her to work in the office 42 years ago—Chabad today has nearly 40 branches in the Philadelphia area—the excitement that fills the air each Chanukah remains a constant. Since the 1980s the main menorah-lighting event has been preceded by a parade of 200 or so menorah-topped cars, and this year will be followed by a Chanukah event at the National Museum of American Jewish History.

“The Liberty Bell menorah is very grand, especially at night when they light it—I mean, come on, it’s magnificent,” she said. “I still get goosebumps when I see it.”

The public menorah, she said, has allowed Jews to be more open and proud of who they are, and shared Chanukah’s universal message of liberty over tyranny with all. And it’s not an accident that it began all those Chanukahs ago in Philadelphia. “This is the cradle of liberty,” she said. “If not here, then where?”