Hanukkah menorah lights up Whitefish as Jewish community gathers

Chabad of the Flathead Valley will light a 9-foot public Hanukkah menorah at Depot Park, on Dec. 18, the first night of the eight-day Festival of Lights. The ceremony will be followed by a community-wide celebration. Complimentary Hanukkah menorahs and candles will be distributed as well for participants to light at home.

“Everyone is especially excited about Hanukkah this year,” said Shneur Wolf, Rabbi of Chabad of the Flathead Valley. “People are preparing to celebrate with family and friends, to fill their homes with the light of Hanukkah, and there’s a palpable joy. The public Hanukkah celebration is about sharing this light and joy with the broader community and the entire Flathead Valley.”

According to a press release, Hanukkah emphasizes that each and every individual has the unique power to illuminate the entire world. It was to encourage this profound idea that the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, launched the Hanukkah awareness campaign in 1973, of which Whitefish’s public Hanukkah activities are a part of.

The menorah faces the street, the Rebbe notes, and so bypassers immediately feel “the effect of the light, which illuminates the outside and the environment.” In the half-century since, the Rebbe’s campaign has brought Hanukkah into the mainstream and altered awareness and practice of the festival, returning what some mistakenly dismissed as a minor holiday to its roots as a public proclamation of the triumph of freedom over oppression and a mainstay of Jewish cultural and religious life.

Chabad-Lubavitch's annual Hanukkah campaign has distributed millions of menorahs to Jews around the world, and erected thousands of public menorahs to share its universal message of light over darkness with humanity at large. This year’s Hanukkah campaign will be one of unprecedented light and joy, seeing Chabad reach 8 million Jews in more than 100 countries. Energetic crowds will once again be gathering on streets and thoroughfares, in great metropolises and small towns alike, to participate in the more than 15,000 large public menorahs Chabad will place worldwide.

The Community Hanukkah Celebration in Depot Park is on Sunday, Dec. 18 at 4:30 p.m. It is free for the community.

There will be three public menorah displays in the Flathead Valley throughout Chanukah. One on the corner of Highway 93 and Montana 40, one in front of Corwin Honda and another on the corner of Wyoming and Highway 93 (Sunset Blvd) in Kalispell.