By Dovid Zaklikowski for COLlive and Hasidic Archives
Putting up a public menorah in a town like Teaneck, New Jersey, might seem like a simple matter. But the battle to erect one there lasted 6 years and was fiercely fought by both sides.
Before Chanukah 1981, Rabbi Yisroel Brod received a call from a woman who identified herself as a member of the Teaneck Jewish Community Council. She wanted to talk about the large Chanukah menorah he had put up in the garden of the Hackensack courthouse the year before. “I thought she was calling to praise the menorah,” says Rabbi Brod, who was then director of Chabad of Bergen County.
In fact, she was calling to complain. The JCC of Teaneck had worked long and hard to remove all Christian symbols from public spaces, she said. What he was doing made them look hypocritical. Rabbi Brod let her know there was nothing to talk about. The menorah would go up again. The call actually inspired the rabbi to put up a menorah in Teaneck as well.
Rabbi Brod submitted a request to the town council. The Teaneck JCC reached a unanimous decision to oppose the menorah. With their influence on the council, the request was denied. No menorah was displayed that year on public property in Teaneck. However, Chabad of Bergen County put up menorahs in 13 other towns in the county.
The next year, Rabbi Brod decided he was going to take the Teaneck fight to court. “I kept on saying that I would take them up to the Supreme Court if they did not let me put the Chanukah menorah up,” he recalls, “because, according to the Rebbe, there is no problem according to the constitution.”
During the week before Chanukah, Teaneck’s Jewish activists and politicians campaigned against the menorah, and even got their state senator, who had a close relationship with Lubavitch, personally involved.
When religious leaders met Rabbi Brod in Teaneck they discouraged him from going to court, saying, “There are more important issues Jews should go to court for.”
Once the Beth Din had ruled, the Rebbe wrote to Rabbi Moshe Herson, Head Shliach of Chabad in New Jersey, that they should not continue to fight for the menorah in Teaneck. Instead, they should strike a deal with the senator to erect a menorah in the state capital, Trenton. This was accomplished with no controversy.
Years passed, and there was still no public menorah in Teaneck. Rabbi Brod handed over the reins of Bergen County Chabad to Rabbi Mordechai Weiss (Chabad of Bergen County is headed today by Rabbi Ephraim and Nechamy Simon). It bothered Rabbi Weiss that there was no menorah in a town with such a large Jewish population.
One year, during the holiday season, Rabbi Weiss noticed a home that had a Chanukah menorah in one window and a Christmas tree in the other. “I wanted to understand what was happening,” he recalls, “so I knocked on the door and asked for the explanation.” He told them he was a neighbor and the rabbi of the local Chabad synagogue. It turned out that the woman of the house was Jewish; her husband was not.
Rabbi Weiss maintained his relationship with the couple, visiting every once in a while. A few years later, the man became a member of the Teaneck town council. “I spoke to him how it was unfair that they [Christians] could put up lights on live trees, and have signs in the libraries, and we cannot put a Chanukah menorah on public property,” Rabbi Weiss says. The man agreed. Perhaps not surprisingly, his wife, who was Jewish, opposed the menorah.
In 1987, the councilman raised the issue of the menorah once again. This time, hearing it championed by one of their own, the other Teaneck councilmembers supported the idea.
A public menorah has been erected in front of the Municipal Building every year since. Making history, this year for the first time it was actually lit with Mayor of Teaneck, Mohammed Hameeduddin, lighting the shamash and Teaneck’s former deputy mayor Yitz Stern lit the menorah.
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