Rabbi Shmuel Butman was the longtime director of the Lubavitch Youth Organization in New York until his passing in July of 2024. He was interviewed in December 2011 and January 2012.
In 1977, I had been working at the Lubavitch Youth Organization, which oversees Chabad’s outreach work in the New York area, for a little over ten years. By then, a handful of cities around America had started to have public Chanukah menorah lightings, and we figured that New York deserved to have one too.
So, that Chanukah, Mayor Abraham Beame gave us permission to put up a public menorah on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue…