A Tale of Two ... Three Menorahs

So as it turns out, I have three menorahs. I thought I had two, but when I was looking this morning for the one I wanted to light, I have three.


The one on the left, the brass one, is one that I bought about twenty years ago because I thought it would be nice to have a menorah that I liked, that I picked out, which I had never had before. It's the one I light every year. The one on the right in the picture has a story.

My Grandpa Sam was an Orthodox Jew, but he compromised on a lot of the details over the years because he was poor. If he had to work on Saturday, well then he prayed for forgiveness and he was sure that G-d forgave him. (In the context of my grandfather, I'll use the Jewish convention for putting the name of the Almighty into print.) I was told that when my mother was a child, her mother lit the Sabbath candles on Friday nights, but I never saw her do that, and I never saw my grandparents light a menorah on Chanukah, but I think that was because they always came to visit us on Chanukah and helped light ours. I assume they had one, but since I was never in their home when it came out, who knows?

In 1970, a young man in the Soviet Union petitioned his government for the right to emigrate to Israel, and was turned down. Following that, he refused to accept this decision and was deported to Israel (?) and he later came to New York and staged a hunger strike outside the United Nations to try to get his family released as well. He was the first "refusenik", as these Russian-Jewish would-be emigrants were called; his Russian name was Yaakov Kazakov. He was my grandmother's nephew -- her sister's grandson, actually -- and when he came to New York, he brought this menorah from Israel as a gift to my grandparents.

My grandmother, as she did with any nice things she had, wrapped it up and put it away "for later." She gave it to me, unused, when I got married, and so it was the menorah I had and lit every year until I got the brass one. It's in an Israeli-art style that I never liked, and although I liked the story (and Yaakov, whom I met, and his grandmother Sonia, when she later came to visit from Israel), I just didn't care for this menorah. But my kids loved it, it was our menorah, it came from my grandmother, we HAD to use it every year! So some years, I lit both.

I didn't even remember that I had the little one in front, the third one. I'm guessing it must have belonged to my parents, although it's not the one we lit when I was a kid. That was a cheap tin menorah, with all the candleholders loose, but it was the same shape and format as this one (but not in the Israeli enameled style.) This must have been the menorah my mother wanted, and bought after we grew up.


I have so many boxes of candles because I buy a box every year but I never remember to light the menorah each night for eight nights, so I have extra. This year I'm using the nice beeswax ones on the upper right. I've never used beeswax before. The candles are lit at sunset, the center one first each night, and then that one is used to light the others, one the first night, two the second night, and so on. The candles melt down and burn out in a half hour or so; they're one-use-only.

I found this paper today, too; I didn't realize I had it. Despite her father's Orthodoxy, my mother wasn't raised that way; anyway, girls didn't go to Hebrew school or have Bat Mitzvahs in her day. So when she lit the candles every year, she had to read the prayer, and this is the cheat-sheet she read it from. I'm sure she had this before I was born, and I saw it in her hands -- later in mine -- every Chanukah of my childhood. We have always read aloud the transliterated Hebrew prayer, which is to say, it sounds like Hebrew, but we read it in English, like this:

Bo-ruch atoh a-do-noy, e-lo-he-nu me-lech ho-o-lom ...

Do I still read it when I light the candles? I do. I don't do it because I believe in G-d so much as I do it because I believe in the history and traditions of the people of whom I am one. The English translation appears below the Hebrew on the page:

Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us by thy commandments, and has commanded us to kindle the lights of Chanukah.

Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who wroughtest miracles for our fathers in days of old, at this season.