Rabbi Moshe Langer calls it the “Mama Menorah,” and this year, Mama turns 50.
He’s referring to the 22-foot mahogany-and-steel hanukkiah lit annually in San Francisco’s Union Square during the Festival of Lights. Langer, who runs the day-to-day operations of Chabad of SF, credits it with having “given birth to all these other menorahs” — some 15,000 Chabad-sponsored public menorah lightings around the world, according to the rabbi.
For the 50th anniversary of the Bill Graham Menorah — named posthumously for the rock promoter who helped create, fund and sustain the project before his death in 1991 — Chabad is going all out to celebrate.
This year, the first night of Hanukkah falls on Sunday, Dec. 14. The City of San Francisco has proclaimed that date “Bill Graham Menorah Day,” with Union Square festivities running from 2:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., including the menorah lighting at 5 p.m. Expect plenty of surprise celebrity guests and musical performers to light up the eight nights, Langer said.
Chabad is also publishing a commemorative program, recounting the history of the menorah and featuring congratulatory messages and archival photos of the event through the decades.
“The symbol of the menorah — a little light pushing away the darkness — is something that inspires every person on Planet Earth,” Langer said. “You don’t need to be any one race or religion to buy into that idea to spread light.”
Langer, 40, grew up celebrating Hanukkah at Union Square. He credits his parents, Rabbi Yosef Langer and Rebbetzin Hinda Langer, as the key organizers and champions of the event from the start.
Over the years, the event has attracted a wide swath of guests. Politicians such as Gavin Newsom, Ed Lee, Willie Brown, Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris have ascended the scaffold with torch in hand. Musicians such as Carlos Santana, Matisyahu and Country Joe McDonald have performed. And countless thousands of Jews and non-Jews have turned out to witness the spectacle.
Although the very first Chabad menorah lighting took place at Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell in 1974, the inaugural San Francisco event followed the next year. As common as such events are now, back then they were controversial.
Rabbi Joseph Asher, the senior rabbi of Reform-affiliated Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco from 1967 to 1986, worried about church-state separation issues, David Eliezrie wrote in his 2015 book, “The Secret of Chabad: Inside the World’s Most Successful Jewish Movement.”
Asher called the proposed menorah lighting “vulgar sensationalism and crass parochialism” and “the newest challenge to the Bill of Rights,” according to Eliezrie.
That didn’t stop Yosef Langer of Chabad of SF and Rabbi Chaim Drizin of Chabad of Berkeley from teaming up to launch the annual menorah lighting in San Francisco.
“The mitzvah of the menorah is to glorify miracles,” the elder Langer told J. on the occasion of its 40th anniversary in 2015. “The more you can bring the light to the Jewish people and beyond, the more you bring religious freedom to everyone.”
Langer and Drizin had the ambition and drive, but Graham put them over the top by funding and overseeing construction of the massive menorah.
They rented Union Square from the city, and on Nov. 29, 1975, Langer stepped into a cherry picker that bore him aloft to light the first candle as more than 1,000 people, including Graham, looked on.
Graham, who opened the city’s iconic Fillmore Auditorium in the 1960s and propelled the careers of icons such as Janis Joplin, Grateful Dead and Santana, died at age 60 in a helicopter crash near Vallejo in October 1991. Ten months earlier, he stood on the scaffold to light the menorah for his first and only time.
Graham, who was born in Berlin in 1931, grew up in Nazi Germany, escaped in the Kindertransport and eventually was transported to the U.S., still a child and without his family.
“My dad never spoke about his time as a young boy in Europe or his early years in America,” son David Graham told J. “I think the menorah project was his way of keeping in touch with his past and sharing it with others. It’s another example of Bill’s enormous capacity and will to help his fellow man and the community at large. I know he’d be very proud the tradition carries on to this day.”
Moshe Langer remembers his own father’s endless creativity in producing and promoting the menorah lightings. One year, for instance, he got a troop of Chinese acrobats to perform before the lighting of the menorah.
“When my husband took over, he wanted to make a party out of the whole thing,” Hinda Langer told J. “The concerts were free to the public, with beautiful Jewish music.”
Yosef Langer, Chabad of SF’s executive director for nearly half a century, has curtailed much of his public duties at age 79 and turned the reins over to his son, who serves as operations director. But the elder Langer, that hog-riding former Deadhead turned Rally Rabbi, will be there for eight crazy nights to mark the Hanukkah tradition he started.
“He’ll be dancing,” said his son.
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the late leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, “taught that you can never do enough when you do community work,” Langer said. “My father has this approach.”