On a cold Chanukah night in the winter of 1974, five Chabadniks schlepped a small wooden menorah and placed it on 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.
And so, the public menorah was born. Today, the Chabad-Lubavitch movement erects as many as 15,000 giant menorahs on public squares from Washington, D.C., to Vienna to Melbourne, Australia.
“The entire idea of placing a menorah like this came directly from the Rebbe’s inspiration to light up the world,” said Rabbi Avrohom Shemtov, who has served as director of Chabad of Philadelphia since 1962.
Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, launched a worldwide Chanukah awareness campaign just a year earlier, urging every Jewish home to light a menorah, children to have and light their own, and people to encourage their friends and neighbors to do so, too.
“There is a special advantage in the mitzvah of the Chanukah lights,” Schneerson explained at a farbrengen gathering held on Dec. 15, 1973, “for when a Jew kindles a menorah, literal light emanates from it and illuminates the street.”
In the months that followed Schneerson’s call to action, Chabad activists placed advertisements 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 Jewish Exponent.
“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.”
Cities 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 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 several 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 at the time. “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 with 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 1980s, 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, he would prove a great ally of the public menorah. When the local branch of the ACLU condemned the Liberty Bell menorah in 1979, 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 strongly opposed them. At the time, 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, joined the ACLU in opposition around the country.
In the winter of 1979, Shemtov responded to the ACLU’s ire with laughter—literally. He invited 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 a 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. “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 (County of Allegheny v. ACLU), culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1989 ruling in favor of public menorah displays.
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 counterproductive.
“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,” Schneerson wrote to the Reform movement’s 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,” he continued.
Many of Chabad’s former menorah opponents now sponsor public displays of their own. Towards the end of his life, Arthur Hertzberg, leader of the American Jewish Congress, acknowledged that 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.”
‘The cradle of liberty’
What started in Philadelphia, the 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. 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, then-President Jimmy Carter walked out of the White House and kindled the shamash before Eizenstat’s 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 former President Ronald Reagan, it 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. In the 1980s, public menorahs were installed in Buenos Aires, London, Paris and Milan. With the fall of communism, Berlin and Moscow joined these locations. By this point, one would be hard-pressed to find a city or country without a public menorah.
Lois Yampolsky has been the administrative assistant at the Chabad Center on Castor Avenue in Philadelphia since 1982. A sprightly 80-year-old, the pink-haired Yampolsky has since helped prepare for the annual Liberty Bell menorah-lighting and event by 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 car-topped menorahs, and this year, it 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,” Yampolsky said. “I still get goosebumps when I see it.”
She said the public menorah has allowed Jews to be more open and proud of their identities 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,” Yampolsky said. “If not here, then where?”
Reprinted with permission from Chabad.org/News.