Honk if you like car menorahs

Around this time every year, cars topped with oversized electric menorahs begin to appear on streets of the United States, England and elsewhere.

Of these cities, perhaps the car-mounted menorahs are best suited to Los Angeles, a city known for its automobile-centered lifestyle and its traffic.

L.A.’s Ground Zero for the car-mounted menorahs, an invention of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, is Yeshiva Ohr Elchonon Chabad, a seminary for approximately 200 Chabad high school students in Hancock Park. This is where the menorahs that roam L.A.’s streets atop cars are assembled every year before the eight-day Festival of Lights, which this year takes place Dec. 6-14.

Minutes before sundown on a recent Friday afternoon, Dovid Chazan, student program director at Yeshiva Ohr Elechonon Chabad, provided this reporter with a tour of a storage room at the school that contained more than a dozen of the large menorahs, each emblazoned with the words “Happy Chanukah from Chabad Lubavitch.” 

The storage room also held stacks of boxes of what Chazan described as “menorah kits.” Each kit contains a small menorah, candles and a dreidel, he said. 

Chazan said the school ordered 5,700 menorah kits this year, and he expects to distribute about 3,000 of them to community members at senior citizen homes, shopping malls and Ralphs grocery stores across L.A. The school mails the remaining kits to other Chabad centers throughout California.

“Chanukah is important because [it commemorates] a time when the Jews were in exile, and still in exile they prevailed,” Chazan, 21, a Crown Heights-based student emissary to Los Angeles, told the Journal, referring to the story of the Maccabees’ military victory over the Seleucid rulers of Judea in ancient times.

He said there are plans for a parade, set to take place in Los Angeles on the evening of Dec. 10, that will include a caravan of 80 menorah-topped cars, including community members who have car menorahs saved from previous years, driving around town. The parade will start at the school’s Hancock Park campus and end in Beverly Hills.

Why does Chabad affix menorahs to car roofs? It represents the fulfillment of the Chanukah mitzvah of pirsumei nisa (publicizing the miracle), according to Santa Monica-based Chabad Rabbi Eli Levitansky. 

“There are two parts of Chanukah: the lighting of the menorah for the home … that’s one mitzvah of Chanukah,” Levitansky said in a phone interview. “There is another element of Chanukah — publicizing the miracle.”

 “We take the message of Chanukah and share it with the entire world. The menorah wasn’t there to light up the temple; it’s rather to share light onto the whole world. The message of the menorah — we put it by the window or the door and we light it during the darkest time of day, to bring light into the world,” Rabbi Shalom Cunin, a nephew of Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin, director of Chabad West Coast, said in a phone interview.

He equated darkness with the recent attacks in “France … [and in] Israel.”

When it comes to car menorahs, “each Chabad has their own little shpiel,” Cunin said. He recalled Chabad of the Inland Empire Rabbi Sholom Harlig ordering more than 20 Hummers and mounting menorahs on the vehicles’ roofs for use in past parades.

“They look like Army Hummers. He puts menorahs on them and drives them around,” Cunin said. 

Cunin said young Chabadniks have been driving with car menorahs for at least 20 years. The practice originated in New York City, according to chabad.org. 

Chabad promotes Chanukah publicly in other ways as well. Various local Chabads are planning public menorah lighting ceremonies — including one at Los Angeles City Hall — and Chanukah parties across Los Angeles. 

One of the larger lighting ceremonies will be held at The Original Farmers Market at the Grove, organized by Chabad of the Miracle Mile Area. A “Glow in the Dark Chanukah Grand Party” at Chabad of Greater Los Feliz, one of many Chabad-sponsored parties in L.A., is scheduled for Dec. 6. And Chabad has a partnership with the Ralphs supermarket chain in which 5-foot-tall menorahs will be displayed at approximately 30 stores throughout greater Los Angeles, Cunin said. 

“Ralphs is a place that carries a lot of kosher food these days, and a lot of Jews are found there,” Cunin said.

Although Chabad takes Chanukah, which is a minor holiday compared to Torah-based festivals, seriously, it does so with a commitment to lightheartedness. Come Chanukah, Chabadniks make menorahs out of items ranging from jelly beans to Legos to ice, Cunin said, explaining that, according to Jewish law, menorahs can be made out of any material as long as they are lit with a real flame. Electric menorahs, such as the ones found on cars, are not kosher, according to Jewish law.

A smaller parade of approximately 15 vehicles with car-mounted menorahs will take place in Santa Monica, tentatively scheduled for 11 a.m. Dec. 7, Levitansky said. 

He is excited about it.

“The parade is done because of the same idea of spreading the miracle, of publicizing the miracle,” Levitansky said. “People should be aware of the miracle of Chanukah.”