A plastic menorah story

I had a giant menorah
I made it out of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene…

Okay, the rhyme here isn’t quite as obvious as for a clay-based menorah. And substituting the particular brand of polystyrene plastic — Lego bricks — doesn’t help all that much.

But the lack of a song hasn’t deterred builders of Lego menorahs, who had two high-profile tall Chanukah tales to show for their efforts this year.

First was the Gesher School in North London, whose 18-foot-tall menorah was unveiled by Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis last week.

As the London-based Jewish Chronicle reported, the project was led by one of the school’s teaching assistants, Danny Cazzato, who previously had worked at Lego.

Work on the 80,000-brick menorah began in November.

The school’s students helped build the base of the menorah and the nine candles on top, while a master builder built and glued the rest of it together and made sure it was safely secured to the wall in Gesher’s main hall.

In Tel Aviv, meanwhile, the Lego store in the downtown Dizengoff center has claimed the (so-far unverified) title of the world’s largest Lego menorah for its plastic brick construction. While it is shorter than the North London model, standing only 14.7 feet tall, it required 130,000 Lego bricks to build.

Lego builder Yitzy Kasowitz from North Miami Beach oversaw the construction, done by hundreds of kids, parents, and grandparents, as part of the store’s ChanukahLego festival.