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nd what better way to relate to the world outside than with a giant Chanukah menorah? For the last eight years, Moully has been creating large-scale Chanukah art displays, having embarked on a journey to broaden the “public menorah” concept. What began as large menorah paintings on canvas morphed into murals, then to engaging Chanukah art experiences that evolved into 3D interactive touch-sensitive menorahs, to iconic custom designs, including a menorah overlooking the East River that’s on display annually throughout December.

“I realized this is something I need to do every year,” Moully says. “To create a piece of public art for Chanukah, in line with the pirsumei nissa theme of Chanukah of spreading the miracles and the light to the outside.”

While Moully didn’t have a five- or ten-year plan, creating a new menorah every year just happened organically.

“I’m embracing the rise of the public art menorah,” Moully says. “It’s not just about lighting a menorah. My goal is that every year I want to share a new design of a new menorah — it’s an opportunity that’s more than just about ceremonial objects, but rather about cultural icons and public art.”

The timely message of the menorah has never felt more relevant. A symbol of triumph, a beacon of strength and light amidst darkness and hate, it is now more than ever that the Jewish people, even those not strongly affiliated, have begun clinging to their identity and gaining strength from their past.

2018 Drive with Your Brights

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ollowing the Tree of Life congregation terrorist attack shooting on Shabbos morning in October 2018 in which 11 people were killed, Moully knew what his contribution would be: a public mural that would spread a message of light in precarious times. All Chanukah he drove around in his own RV with a 25-foot “canvas” on both sides. He invited people to write on it a mitzvah they would do, each one of which transformed the canvas from black to bright colors while also painting that night’s flame. After eight days, the mural was completed.

“Until then I was an ‘inside’ artist, creating paintings on canvas, but the synagogue shooting just a few weeks before Chanukah created a shift,” he says. “I felt I had to do something from my end. But I’d only painted a few murals before, and anyway I couldn’t find an appropriate wall, but then it dawned on me that I have an RV that my family uses to travel in the summertime to do art shows.”

So he brought the concept of a mural to the public on his 30-foot RV. He printed two large 24-foot banners on the two sides of the vehicle and painted a picture of a tree in smoke on black canvas on the back, symbolizing the Tree of Life synagogue with eleven flames in memory of the victims.

He says he used the black canvas to show that there is darkness in the world and yet, every mitzvah a Jew does lights up the darkness. Moully drove all over New York and New Jersey, to schools and community menorah lightings, with a basket full of bright colored markers. He would stop and engage the public and invite people to write mitzvos they would do in bright markers.

“They were transforming that black canvas into light,” he says. “For eight days the painting continued to grow — it was a collaborative piece that was created by the public, and I added a flame each day so as we were driving around you saw the menorah’s flame for that day. It was no longer just a painting in my studio. I invited the public into creating this Chanukah painting together with me.”

2019 Tunnel Vision

The Jersey City terror attack at a kosher grocery, in which three Jews were murdered, came just days before Chanukah of 2019. That year, Moully decided to use the same collaborative theme, and created a wall mural, arranged for people to write messages, and got local artists to paint an additional flame every night of Chanukah for this street art display. This permanent mural is still up, seen daily by thousands on their way into the Holland Tunnel going to New York.

2020 Share Your Light

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hat year, Moully wanted to do something different. “I realized that this was a mission Hashem was sending me on,” he says. “Now it was the third year in a row. I had this challenge of creating a public art menorah and I wanted to do something different, not a typical, standard menorah.”

Moully decided to use the theme that each one of us is a light; that like a candle, each one of us has a unique light to share. So he went to the chaplain of Pratt Institute, an art school in downtown Brooklyn, and they collaborated on a staged photo shoot of eight different Jewish community members, each one holding up a candle with the campus rabbi in the center as the shamash. He then printed the photos on huge 20-foot-tall paper and glued it to a wall in Brooklyn near the campus. Then, every night, he painted the flame of each additional person sharing light.

“The idea was to show that it’s not just these eight community members and a rabbi holding their lights, but that everybody can and should share their special, unique light.”

Go with Your Glow

And that brought Moully to his next phase. Instead of a two-dimensional mural on the wall, he decided on the same theme idea, yet in three dimensions.

A friend challenged him about the “Share Your Light” mural from the year before: Why should they be the only people who get to spread light? Everyone should be able to spread light.

“That got me thinking,” he said. “So I thought, let’s make a menorah where, when you touch it, you complete a circuit and light it up. When you let go, the light goes off. It would symbolize an individual person’s light — and then the next thought was that this is a community’s light. I need your light and you need my light, and we need each other’s light to create the menorah.”

Moully had never done a touch-sensitive menorah before, but he had the vision: “I wanted it to be interactive,” he relates. “I wanted to go to a different location every night of Chanukah to share this message, as I had done the year before.”

This one would be called “Living Lights.” With no prior experience and no instruction manual, he set out to build it. He found a decommissioned streetlamp in the local community and used it as the base.

“We welded a base together and used that as the vertical. From there, we worked with steel and aluminum through trial and error,” he says. He purchased aluminum, added lights that resembled oversized streetlamps, and worked with a local low-voltage programmer to learn how to operate DMX stage lights.

He borrowed DMX lights, bought staging of different heights so children could reach the arms, but it wasn’t easy.

Although it wasn’t ready until the second night of Chanukah, the 11-foot-tall, 17-foot-wide interactive menorah traveled across the city: first to the Jewish Children’s Museum in Brooklyn, then to Fifth Avenue, and eventually to the American Dream Mall (where it became part of a large community event) after logistical concerns prevented it from being installed at Chabad of Wall Street on a Friday afternoon in time for Shabbos.

Made of aluminum, wires, DMX lights, and heavy staging — and requiring a rented truck and a crew just to transport it — the project proved far more demanding than painting a mural. But the payoff of sharing people’s light was worth it.

“It was exciting,” he said. “A family of two or three or four would come, they’d touch it, and then they’d tell others, ‘Go get more people.’ Then you’d have eight people lighting it together, and all the lights would flash in a big show. It was very much an interactive piece, inviting the public to get involved, to understand the message of individual and collective light as a community.”

2022 Beacon on the Sea

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he previous year, Moully had been scheduled to bring his Living Lights menorah to Wall Street, but time constraints on a Friday made it impossible. Fortunately, though, Moully got another chance. The president of the South Street Seaport, a Jewish man preparing to leave his position, wanted to create a meaningful legacy, to leave a Jewish symbol behind for the Seaport. He approached his local rabbi and said he wanted “a really cool, really unique, interesting menorah” as a permanent Jewish symbol for the Seaport. The rabbi recommended he contact Yitzchok Moully.

“I came up with three different designs,” Moully says. He presented them to the decision-makers at Howard Hughes Corporation, which oversees the Seaport. They chose a menorah inspired by a small sailboat — fitting for its location on Pier 17, overlooking the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge.

“You couldn’t ask for a better spot in terms of pirsumei nissa and spreading the message,” Moully says.

This time, he had three months to complete the project. Fabricated entirely from stainless steel, the menorah had a minimalist design but required careful engineering. Positioned on a windy pier, it had to withstand gusts of up to 250 miles per hour. It sits on a weighted base without bolts, with a single vertical pole supporting the structure.

On the right side are the lights — carefully selected LEDs programmed to comply with the Seaport’s rule prohibiting open flames.

“They’re programmed for the next ten years,” Moully says. Each Chanukah, the lights turn on automatically after sunset for all eight days, except for Shabbos, when it goes on before sunset on Friday and after Shabbos on Saturday night. After the current ten-year cycle, he plans to return and reset it.

Today, the Seaport Menorah stands as the official Chanukah display for the South Street Seaport. It’s installed each year from late November through the end of December, glowing over the water with the Brooklyn Bridge behind it.

“It stands out there proudly,” Moully says. “It now belongs to the Seaport, and even though the president who commissioned it has moved on, it lights up every year. Everyone can come see it.”

2023 We’re All Connected

Commissioned by Chabad of London, this illuminated menorah is on permanent display in front of the Chabad headquarters in Stamford Hill.

“What’s different about this is that for the first time, I was commissioned to make a permanent sculpture, a menorah that would stay up all year long, not just on Chanukah,” Moully says. “I was playing with this concept of the interconnectedness of the Jewish People and the interplay between each other and so that’s the woven effect, which I’ve used for my other public art menorahs as well.”

The arms intersect and overlap at the bottom, creating the symbolism behind the piece.

“When two people come together, they create something greater than themselves,” Moully explains. “It’s the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, that the third entity is greater. That’s what community is all about.”

Moully designed the menorah in a way that the entire face of the 15-foot-tall creation is lit up and that it illuminates the gray London skies all year long. He designed it in the US and they built it to his specifications, made from steel, LED lights, and plexiglass for a special, diffused look crossing over at the base.

2024 Still Unique

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he woven, interconnected theme replayed in last year’s limited-edition public art menorah, a symbol of both spiritual resilience and modern elegance. At an impressive ten feet tall, this menorah blends timeless tradition with contemporary design, which is why Moully went into production to make it accessible to a greater amount of people. Every part is custom made, created in a New Jersey warehouse and either placed on the back of a pickup truck for local delivery or shipped through a moving company.

Each one is custom handmade, crafted, designed and engineered by Moully, who even cuts the aluminum in-house at his warehouse. The aluminum then gets welded and then powder-coated, then the top lights are 3D printed and hand painted, featuring programmed state-of-the-art LED lighting at the apex of each arm, while its base is equipped with ten LED spotlights lighting its unique form from below.

Even though the pieces are widely available, Moully is strict about not getting involved in mass production.

“That’s not art,” Moully says. “My goal is to make public art menorahs accessible to everyone, but keep them unique.”

Brighter and Prouder

This year’s design, called “Tradition with a Twist,” reimagines the menorah in a balance between tradition and modernity. Standing seven feet tall, and crafted in Moully’s studio from nine vertical aluminum pillars with a dynamic spiral twist, it’s a message that evokes spiritual resilience and aesthetic elegance.

In response to a terrorist attack in Boulder, Colorado, earlier this year, Moully felt this would be an appropriate message.

“I felt that we need something bigger and brighter and prouder, and so I arranged to have someone sponsor the menorah for them. It’s now being shipped there and it will be displayed in the exact same place that Jewish life was taken,” Moully says.

With his growing collection of public art menorahs, Moully is honored to be part of a living celebration of Judaism.

“Through these works, I hope to make Jewish light visible in the public square, and to invite Jews everywhere to share their light with the world — proudly, publicly, and together,” Moully says. “My original motivation — the two unique and elemental ideas at the heart of the Chanukah menorah, to place the menorah specifically in public, and to light up the darkness — had guided every project and continues to drive my work today, bringing light where it’s needed most, and reminding us all that the light we share together can outshine any darkness.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1090)