Decades of Car Menorahs Lighting the Way
You know them when you see them, and when you see them, you know it’s Chanukah. The car menorah is a uniquely American innovation—a marketing gimmick created by young yeshivah students in the early 1970s.
In 1973 the Lubavitcher Rebbe announced his Chanukah-awareness campaign, encouraging his followers and emissaries to reach out to their fellow Jews and give them the opportunity to kindle the Chanukah lights.
“Those early car menorahs were crude wooden things which were put together by a group of students,” remembers Rabbi Mendel Feller, who studied in the Oholei Torah Yeshiva in Crown Heights in the mid-1980s. Together with his friends he put together the first car Menorah parade. Today Rabbi Feller is the Rabbi of Upper Midwest Merkos-Lubavitch House.
“If I had to guess, I’d say our class made about 40 or 50 of them,” says Rabbi Sholom Ciment, a classmate of Fellers and a Boston native who now serves as co-director of Chabad Lubavitch of Greater Boynton Beach in South Florida. Ciment says. “That year, we made the very first car-menorah parade, which was an incredible sight.”
