World’s Largest Menorah

This week, people around the world are celebrating Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights, by lighting menorahs. Most menorahs are small enough to fit on a table or a windowsill, but New York City is home to two of the world’s largest menorahs! One is at the southeast corner of Central Park in Manhattan, and the other is in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Both menorahs are 32 feet tall, the maximum size allowed by Jewish law, so there has been a friendly rivalry between the two sites for decades. The Guinness Book of World Records gave the honor of the record to the Central Park menorah back in 2006, even though the Brooklyn menorah is actually a few inches taller. The lighting of the Central Park menorah on the first night of Hanukkah was celebrated with music, dancing, and a parade of cars driving up Sixth Avenue.

Bryant Park Winter Village

Here in the US, we are celebrating Thanksgiving! For many, this marks the start of the holiday season. In New York City, businesses and public parks are getting ready for the holidays. Every year, Bryant Park, adjacent to the New York Public Library in Midtown Manhattan, fills to the brim with festive shops. At the center of the park, visitors take advantage of the cold weather and go ice skating on the park’s rink. From friends skating circles around each other, to couples holding hands, and kids just learning to balance, the ice rink is a hit. The Winter Village is full of both tourists and native New Yorkers, all enjoying the frosty air and the excitement of the holiday season. It’s the perfect place to shop for unique and beautiful gifts for loved ones, or to simply sip hot chocolate and enjoy the festive atmosphere.

The US Capitol in Washington DC

The United States Capitol building is one of the most recognizable structures in the country. Its broad wings extend to the north and south, and its tall white dome is one of its most notable features. The building, originally designed in the 1790s, was created as a symbol of democracy and freedom. Surrounded by vast green lawns and a series of monuments, memorials, and museums, the building is impressive even today. The city of Washington DC was built with the Capitol at its center. George Washington’s trusted city planner, the Frenchman Pierre Charles L’Enfant, designed the city with wide diagonal boulevards connecting important sites, many of them radiating out from Capitol Hill. This design allows the building’s distinct dome to be seen from great distances, including from the White House, the baseball stadium, several city parks, and Union Station, where many people arrive in the city.

The Garment Worker by Judith Weller

Throughout New York City, permanent monuments grace sidewalks, street corners, and parks. Many of those monuments commemorate important events, influential people, and well-known heroes. Some, however, stand in tribute to everyday New Yorkers. Judith Weller’s “The Garment Worker” is one such statue, depicting a man in a yarmulke working at an old-fashioned sewing machine. Weller, originally from Israel, based the figure on memories of her father, a machine operator in the garment industry, similarly bent over a sewing machine hard at work. Jewish immigrants like the man depicted in the statue have a long and storied history in New York, with the first wave of them arriving as early as the 1650s. A few centuries later, from about the 1880s to the 1920s, the Jewish population in New York City boomed, growing by nearly 1 million in just a few decades. Many of these new arrivals ended up working in New York City’s prosperous garment industry, at one point making up a large majority of the labor force in that field. “The Garment Worker” sits at his table on 7th Avenue, a larger-than-life homage to the Jewish garment workers who made up “the backbone of Jewish life in New York at the turn of the century,” and the immigrants who shaped New York City.