Courtesy of National Menorah on the Ellipse and the American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad); background: boulemon/iStock / Getty Images Plus/Getty Images
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Audience members at the National Menorah Lighting at the Mall in 2021
Sasha Rogelberg | Staff Writer
T he crowd for this year’s National Menorah light-
ing in Washington, D.C., is expected to exceed
4,000 guests. That’s the estimate of Rabbi Levi
Shemtov, executive vice president of American Friends of
Lubavitch (Chabad), the group that has lit the menorah
and put it on display near the White House annually since
1979. In its first year, the White House Chanukah cande-
labra was a humble 4 feet tall; today, it’s about 30 feet.

And just as the menorah has grown in size, so, too,
have the crowds to see the spectacle. Shemtov expects
this year’s turnout to surpass the pre-COVID crowds.

This year, he adds, the menorah lighting on Sunday,
Dec. 18 — the first night of the eight-day holiday — is
especially important. In a climate of increasing antisem-
itism, the menorah represents defiance against hate, as
it did 2,000 years ago when the Maccabees overthrew
their Greek-Syrian oppressors, the sustained light of the
menorah representing Jewish resistance.

“The central message of Chanukah is that light will
always prevail over darkness, no matter how dark it seems,”
Shemtov said. “And this story hasn’t changed in millennia.”
For thousands of years, the menorah has been a
symbol of Chanukah’s message of resilience and Jewish
pride, but its presence in America’s public sphere has
only emerged relatively recently — for the past 48 years,
in which time it endured a Supreme Court case, dissent
within the Jewish community, a pandemic and a rising
tide of antisemitism.

However, year after year — though not without con-
troversy — it still emerges as a motif of both Jewish grit
and joy.

Before Levi Shemtov became the steward of the
National Menorah lighting, the torch was held by his
father, Rabbi Abraham (Avrohom) Shemtov.

In December 1974, the elder Shemtov, regional direc-
tor of the Philadelphia Lubavitcher Center, organized
the nation’s first public lighting in Philadelphia in front
of Independence Hall. The menorah itself was small
— white and made of wood — not even coming up to
the collarbones of the rabbi and four yeshivah students
accompanying him.

Though the celebration was understated, it was a
snapshot of American culture, Jewish and not. It came
two decades after the Rebbe — Rabbi Menachem Mendel
Schneerson — took over the leadership of the Chabad-
Lubavitch movement in 1951, when he began trans-
forming Chabad from an insular group to a widespread
Jewish philosophy, according to Maya Balakirsky Katz,
assistant professor of Jewish art at Bar-Ilan University
in Israel and author of “The Visual Culture of Chabad.”
‘JUST WAKE THEM UP’
In the years following the Holocaust, the Rebbe
wanted to instill deep Jewish pride and rejuvenate
American Jews from assimilation that could dimin-
ish Jewish identity.

“Their intrinsic value was to go wherever you need
to go to find any last Jew: Just wake them up, not reli-
giously, but to their culture, to their selfhood and to
their nationhood as Jews,” Katz said of what is now the
well-known Chabad modus operandi.

In the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy created
the Peace Corps, designed to send young American
volunteers overseas to advance U.S. ideals such as
democracy. Schneerson, said Katz, employed a similar
strategy, sending Jewish emissaries (shluchim), through-
out the country and the world to boost Jewish life and
education. PUBLICIZING THE MIRACLE
Before that, Jewish rituals and celebrations were rela-
tively private affairs.

“Public Chanukah menorah-lighting was not con-
sidered something we do. Like, you do it in your home;
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