Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Obama Hosts Two Hanukkah Parties To Accommodate Large Guest List

President Obama is for the first time hosting two White House Hanukkah parties to accommodate the high demand for attendance at such events.

The identical parties will take place consecutively, Thursday afternoon and evening, the last day of Hanukkah. Obama’s predecessor, President George W. Bush, launched the tradition of annual formal Hanukkah parties amidst the welter of seasonal Christmas White House parties.

Like Bush, the Obama White House each year faces a crush of requests to attend from Jewish organizational heads, Jewish lawmakers, Jewish donors and others.

Rabbi Levi Shemtov, the director of American Friends of Lubavitch, who supervises kashrut at the White House Hanukkah parties, says that this year has been an especially busy Hanukkah season, with as many as 14 menorah lighting events, many of them organized by his office.

The highlight, he told JTA, was the first ever menorah lighting at Gallaudet University, a university for the deaf and hard of hearing, attended by about 200 Jewish students. There were also two events at Congress, one Tuesday hosted by Lubavitch and another set for Thursday night, to be hosted by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee.

The annual lighting of a giant menorah on the Ellipse facing the White House – dubbed informally the “national menorah” — took place on the first night of Hanukkah, Nov. 27.

About a thousand people braved unseasonably cold weather that evening, and Michael Froman, the U.S. Trade Representative – a Cabinet level position – assisted in the lighting of the menorah.

On Wednesday, a number of Jewish groups participating in a day-long fasting protest for undocumented immigrants on the National Mall, including the National Council of Jewish Women, the Jewish Council on Public Affairs and the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center, held a menorah-lighting ceremony in the protest tent.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.