Author: Matthew Taub / Source: Atlas Obscura
Hanukkah celebrates a miracle that occurred in 165 B.C., and the Statue of Liberty was unveiled in New York Harbor in 1886. The two moments are separated by two millennia and thousands of miles, but Manfred Anson thought it perfectly appropriate to bring them together.
In 1986, for the statue’s centennial, Anson designed a Hanukkah menorah with nine Lady Liberty–shaped branches, and donated it to the Statue of Liberty National Museum. On each of Hanukkah’s eight nights, Jews light another candle on the menorah to commemorate the miracle that took place in Jerusalem, when the Jewish Maccabee warriors rededicated the Temple after overthrowing the Seleucid occupation. They had estimated that they only had enough oil to light the seven-branch menorah for one night, but the fire burned instead for eight. (The ninth branch, the shammash, is used to light the others.) Anson drew a connection between this story and his restorative journey to the United States, after decades of exile and persecution.
As Grace Cohen Grossman, of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, writes in a blog post for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (where one of…
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