Benefiting from the power of unity and the city’s increasing popularity as a tourist destination on Chanukah, Tsfat hosted a record number of public Chanukah lightings this year so numerous it was hard to keep track.
“The classic squares in and around Tsfat’s Old City and elsewhere were bursting non-stop with activity, joy, dancing and Chanukah light everywhere you looked,” said Rabbi Gavriel Marzel, longtime shliach of the Rebbe to Tsfat and director of the Chabad House of the City Center and Tzemach Tzedek Synagogue.
Marzel began developing the public Chanukah lightings in the iconic mystical city more than a decade ago, each year adding manpower and bolstering planning and organization.
“This year, we fully capitalized on the cooperation and participation of Yeshiva Temimei Darech, its bochurim and one Rabbi Shamai Gozlan, maggid shiur and annual Chanukah and year-round mivtzoim spearhead, and the results more than showed our efforts.”
Teams of roving bochurim, some led by Gozlan, others on their own, churned out lighting after lighting, barely keeping up with demand.
Much of the activity and accompanying Chanukah fare was sponsored by Reb Dovid Tornek of Miami, l’ilui nishmat his father, longtime Tsfat community member, Reb Zalman Ber HaLevi Tornek, A”H, who is remembered each year with public lightings on the 5th night of Chanukah, his yartzeit.
In recent years, this all punctuated by musical lightings in the nearby Artist Colony with congregation AQM, this year featuring the yeshiva’s Kabbalah Dream Orchestra led by jazz pianist turned Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Shalom Pasternak.
The Chanukah movement in the northern Israel city, one of the four Holy Cities of Israel, started years ago with a slow trickle of tourists coming to Tsfat to observe and participate in one or two public menorah lightings. Marzel saw the opportunity to build on the trend, nurturing the activity by continually fulfilling requests from tourists to lecture about Chanukah and hold more lightings.
Today, the city hosts a non-stop flow of people who crowd into Tsfat’s narrow corridors and public squares every night of Chanukah to celebrate the festival long after the usual shul-gazing and artist gallery traffic finishes.
The groups come from all over Israel from every imaginable affiliation in yiddishkeit and lack thereof.
“It has taken on a life and identity of its own, with special tour groups and operators leading groups here for this specific purpose, benefiting everyone both spiritually and financially,” Rabbi Marzel said. “Sometimes they forget that the custom was initiated by the Lubavitcher Rebbe decades ago in one of the Rebbe’s many campaigns to bring yiddishkeit to the world and the street as a way of hastening the geulah. We now look to the Rebbe’s promise that this and all of the similar outreach efforts worldwide on Chanukah and throughout the rest of the year will in fact lead to the final Chanukah in the Beis HaMikdash HaShlishi with the coming of Moshiach, speedily now.”
