“It was very special – it was an amazingly unifying event. Jews and non-Jews from all walks of life came,” says Weinbaum. “Everybody was very fascinated by it, so it wasn’t hard to get publicity back then.”
The first large-scale public menorah lighting wasn’t until 1975 when Chabad director of Northern California Rabbi Chaim Itche Drizin – inspired by Rabbi Menachem M Schneerson, who had a year previously established a campaign to promote Chanukah observance – proposed the idea of a giant menorah lighting in San Francisco’s Union Square.
The first major public menorah in San Francisco, in 1975 Credit: Chabad[Missing Credit]
“Chanukah is a holiday when we are supposed to publicise the miracle that happened thousands of years ago,” Rabbi Drizin said then. “It fits.”
The 22-foot mahogany menorah erected in Union Square, which was donated by Holocaust survivor and rock concert promoter Bill Graham, attracted more than 1,000 revellers and established a tradition that would proliferate across the country and even the world.
Now you will find public menorahs everywhere, from Montevideo to Toronto, and from Nicosia to Berlin.
“I think what’s quite unique about the way we celebrate Chanukah as a community – not just in the UK but around the world – is normally we’re celebrating in private, in synagogues and in homes on a Friday night, and Chanukah is the time unlike any other time in the year where we come out and we celebrate in public,” says Russell Langer, director of public affairs at the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC). “The lights of the Chanukiah very much have come to show that there are Jews in this country: we’re here, we’re proud to be Jewish, and we’re proud to be British Jews.”
Along with Chabad UK, the London Jewish Forum, and the mayor of London, JLC sponsors the annual lighting of the Trafalgar Square menorah, one of the largest and most visible in the country. Indeed its luminosity is a key reason why it has been raised there every year since 2007.
“For us as an organisation, having a large menorah in Trafalgar Square, the heart of London, the capital of the country, next to the Christmas tree, is a symbol of how Jews in Britain are proud to show their religion and proud to celebrate in public,” says Langer.
Police at an anti-Israel protest next toTrafalgar Square's giant menorah on the third day of Chanukah last year Credit: GettyAlamy Stock Photo
Weinbaum sees the establishment of public menorahs as part of an effort to re-establish Chanukah as an important festival for Jewish people, and a way to encourage celebration of an oft-forgotten holiday in the Jewish calendar.
“Everybody knows Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and Pesach, but the other festivals had very much fallen into lack of prominence, and this certainly put Chanukah back on the map,” she says. “People in the early years – and still now – came to the menorah lighting and afterwards said, ‘Where can I get a menorah? I haven’t lit a menorah for years, but I’ve seen this and I want to start doing it again’, so it was something of a wake-up call to Jews.”
Other Jewish community leaders have taken the public menorah lighting as a mere starting point for bigger celebrations.
Rabbi Mendy Korer and his wife Hadasa founded Chabad Islington in 2011 and with it began the synagogue’s yearly public menorah-lighting celebration for Chanukah. It has since become the second biggest in the UK.
“It was something certainly very new for the council, and something that was new for the entire borough,” says Rabbi Mendy.
The first year of the celebration, which also featured a clown and free doughnuts, attracted a crowd of 90. Now Chabad Islington’s Chanukah celebration is one of the most well-attended in the country and has been featured in Time Out and some Condé Nast publications. And it involves more than lighting a few oversized candles.
Rabbi Mendy lighting the menorah at London's Islington Green, in 2012 Credit: GettyAFP via Getty Images
“What we’ve developed is not just a lighting but essentially a celebration, a carnival,” says Rabbi Mendy. “We’ll bring in a band, marquees for children’s crafts and doughnuts. One year we did a potato latke contest, getting in different latkes from different companies to taste the different styles. Another year we got a company to come in and do a challenge of walking barefoot on hot coals in Islington Green just off Upper Street. Every year we try to come up with different interactive activities for people to come and just connect and be.”
But while the first public menorah lightings in the UK began what has become a seamless tradition in a nation that has largely welcomed this celebration of the annual eight-day Jewish festival, the establishment of the first public menorahs in the US provoked a backlash.
From the early Eighties until the mid-Nineties, various religious and community organisations slammed Chabad’s publicisation of the menorah and criticised its deployment in public space, arguing that its visibility created tension both within the community and with non-Jews. These squabbles led the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a non-profit tasked with safeguarding the constitutional rights of the US, to claim that the presence of large menorahs on public land violated the First Amendment, which mandates the separation of church and state.
In a twist of irony, it was the same First Amendment that attorney Nathan Lewin repeatedly invoked throughout dozens of successfully litigation cases to assert the right for Jewish people to raise menorahs alongside Christmas trees on public property.
So, while the lighting of the public menorah is in large part about publicising the miracle of Chanukah, it’s also become something of a symbol of our ability to celebrate Jewish festivals with the same freedom and safety afforded other religious and ethnic groups. In 1984, Weinbaum was invited to speak about the public menorah-lighting on a Jewish radio programme called You Don’t Have to Be Jewish with Michael Freedland. She recalls telling him that the message of the public Chanukiah “is that we’re very lucky to live in a country where we have the freedom to practise our religion, and we have to show that we’re grateful for that”.
She adds: “When I got home from doing the recording with him, I got a phone call from the Foreign Office asking if they could they put that out to embassies around the world that the Jews in England were grateful for their religious freedom,” Weinbaum says.
It’s a sentiment she was happy to broadcast back then but she is wearier about now, having seen the Jewish community subjected to rising antisemitism. Because although British menorah-lighting celebrations have been spared the legal turmoil of their American counterparts, there are still risks associated – especially amid the soaring antisemitism of the past 14 months.
Trafalgar Square in 2011 Credit: GettyAFP via Getty Images
A Community Security Trust spokesperson told the JC that since 2022, it has recorded more than double the amount of incidents of damage and desecration to public chanukiot than in the previous seven years combined.
“Our menorah last year was vandalised a few days after it was put up and we’re working together with the council to see how we could ensure that the menorah is better protected this year,” says Rabbi Mendy. “Regretfully there is that sad side of it. Christmas trees don’t get uprooted and other public displays of religious celebrations don’t get desecrated.”
The giant menorah in Golders Green, in London, was the second to be erected in the UK in 1984 Credit: Sandy Weinbaum[Missing Credit]
Weinbaum also recalls that one year the Golders Green Station menorah was daubed with a large swastika overnight.
“We came in the morning and cleaned it all off and carried on, because that’s what Jewish people do,” Weinbaum says. “There are always going to be naysayers and people saying, ‘Are you doing it this year?’ and ‘Aren’t you worried?’ and the answer is it’s Chanukah. This is what we do, and we’re not going anywhere.”
The Golders Green Station menorah in 1984 Credit: Sandy Weinbaum[Missing Credit]