Hanukkah menorah

Along with the seven-branched menorah and the Star of David, it is among the most widely produced articles of Jewish ceremonial art.

The Chabad-Lubavitch movement is well associated with public lighting ceremonies, which it has done since a directive from their last Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, in 1987.

In the book A Kosher Christmas: 'Tis the Season to Be Jewish,[7] author Rabbi Joshua Plaut, Ph.D., details the history of public displays of the hanukkiah across the United States, summarizes the court cases associated with this issue, and explains how Presidents of the United States came to embrace lighting the hanukkiah during Hanukkah.

This celebration of Hanukkah began with the attendance of President Jimmy Carter in the ceremony in Lafayette Park.

Specifically, in the 1989 County of Allegheny v. ACLU case, the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the public display of hanukkiahs and Christmas trees did not violate the Establishment Clause because the two symbols were not endorsements of the Jewish or Christian faith, and were rather part of the same winter holiday season, which the court found had attained a secular status in US society.

In Modern Hebrew, the lamp is generally called a chanukkiyah, a term which originated among Judeo-Spanish speaking Sephardic communities in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 18th century.