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The ‘Hanukkah House’ in Brooklyn is a family tradition and a neighborhood treasure
(New York Jewish Week) — Hanukkah, the winter holiday that commemorates the triumph of Judah Maccabee and the miracle of long-lasting oil, has plenty of heroes to celebrate. But in one Brooklyn family’s home, the hero is the “Hanukkah Fairy” — or at least the mom behind it.
Starting some 25 years ago, Gail Nalven Fuchs and her husband, David Fuchs, stayed up late the night before Hanukkah began to completely decorate the interior of their Midwood house in tinsel, dreidels and blue and white decor. When their two kids awoke wide-eyed at the wonder, the Fuchs explained that the Hanukkah Fairy, who came to decorate and spread the light and joy of the holiday, had paid their house a visit.
Over the years, what began as a lark grown into a grand tradition — these days, eye-catching, illuminated Hanukkah decorations can be found on the home’s exterior and front lawn, too, including an oversized menorah, Jewish stars and inflatables, such as a giant teddy bear wearing a Hanukkah sweater and a spinning dreidel. The “Hanukkah House,” as it is locally known, is now a bonafide neighborhood treasure, attracting neighbors, visitors and children from around Brooklyn.
Fuchs and her family pose in matching sweatshirts outside their decorated house. L-R: Michael, Charlie and Alyson Kogan; Harrison and Katie Bryan; David and Gail Fuchs.
The tradition of Hanukkah decorating started in 1997 when the Fuchs’ kids, Alyson and Harrison, were 7 and 5. It was one of the family’s favorite holiday traditions to drive through the neighborhoods of Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights, where family homes have been putting out over-the-top lights and Christmas decorations since the 1980s.
“Isn’t Hanukkah called the Festival of Lights?” her son, Harrison — the playwright for “A Hanukkah Carol, or GELT TRIP! The Musical,” a Jewish take on Charles Dickens’ Christmas classic — asked one year as they drove through Sheepshead Bay. Fuchs confirmed it was.
“Then why don’t I see any Hanukkah lights?” he asked. “Everything is Christmas themed.”
Fuchs tried to explain to her son that even though the lights are Christmas themed, they are for everyone to enjoy. “He said, ‘I would enjoy it so much more. If I saw something that I know about. I don’t know about Christmas,’” she recalled.
It was a moment of realization for Fuchs. “New Yorkers always say we live in a melting pot,” she told the New York Jewish Week. “It didn’t feel that way at Christmastime.”
In response to Harrison’s questions, she helped him pen a letter to the New York Post. “It’s very hard to be a 5-year-old Jewish boy at this time of year,” the letter, which was published in 1997, opens. “I get very sad when I am driving the car in Brooklyn and I look at all the lights and decorations hanging across the avenues.” Harrison then goes on to request more Hanukkah decorations in the years to come.
The next year, a few weeks before Hanukkah, someone from the New York Post called to let Fuchs and her family know that there would be a large public menorah on Avenue U — sure enough, there it was.
“We drove by and Harrison was so excited. He went home and drew the menorah with paint and we hung it on our wall and he would look at it every day.”
Harrison Bryan as a child in front of handmade Hanukkah art, alongside an excerpt of his letter he wrote to the New York Post in 1997. (Courtesy, design by Mollie Suss)
Seeing how happy her kids were when they saw their holiday represented, Fuchs decided to start decorating her home with dreidels, menorahs, candles, Hanukkah art and tinsel. Enter the Hanukkah Fairy, who Fuchs created to add a sense of magic and wonder to the holiday — and to surprise her young kids.
“Every year there were more and more Hanukkah decorations from the Hanukkah Fairy,” Fuchs said. “The kids used to write letters to her before the holiday saying ‘Hi Hanukkah Fairy, I hope you had a nice year, I cannot wait to see my home decorated this Hanukkah.’”
The exterior decorating began slowly: David Fuchs, who owns a handmade steel manufacturing and distribution business, built the giant menorah. Over the years, the “Hanukkah Elf,” as he’s known by his family, has since built Jewish stars and various signs for the house. They also try to add a Hanukkah-themed inflatable to their collection every year — this year’s newbie is a dinosaur wearing a Hanukkah sweater.
Harrison and Alyson are now 30 and 32, respectively, but the tradition has carried on. To keep the Hanukkah spirit strong, the decorations typically start going up about a week before the holiday starts, and stay up until a week after it ends, Fuchs said.
While Fuchs considers herself a Conservative Jew, many of her neighbors in Midwood are more traditionally Orthodox. Still, she’s noticed that many in the area are eager to take pics with the inflatables — some years, a school bus from a nearby yeshiva even stops in front of the house so kids can look.
“I love sitting back on my porch — nobody sees me and I love watching all the people go by,” she said. “It’s just a joy.”
The Fuchs family has always celebrated Hanukkah to the nines — four generations of the extended family gather at their home for a Hanukkah party, complete with a gift exchange — and decorating the house has become one of their favorite parts of the holiday. Fuchs’ adult children will help decorate the house, and Alyson Fuchs now also puts up decor in her apartment in Carroll Gardens, where her two daughters, who are 2-and-a-half years old and 7 months old, now carry on the wonder and delight at the Hanukkah Fairy.
“We have Hanukkah pride,” she said. “But it’s not so much ‘Hey, I’m Jewish. Here’s my house, too.’ It’s ‘Hey, I have a holiday that’s really a lot of fun. Look how pretty it is.’”
It’s a tradition that’s become so important to the family that the “Hanukkah Fairy” even features in Harrison Fuchs’ new musical. “I really did believe in The Hanukkah Fairy,” Harrison, who uses the stage name Harrison Bryan, told the New York Jewish Week. “To me, this magical entity was just as real as the Tooth Fairy, or Santa to other kids. It was amazing waking up on Hanukkah morning — my sister and I would marvel at all the decorations — blue and white everywhere, and to such an extent that it felt impossible for this to have been done without actual magic.”
“It was only when I got a little bit older that I realized, it was real magic — the magic of having incredibly imaginative parents who wanted their children to feel loved and proud of their cultural identity,” he added.
Bryan made “The Hanukkah Fairy” a character in his musical — the fairy is the “Spirit of Hanukkah Present” who guides the Scrooge-like protagonist Chava Kanipshin through her actions. “Even though it may have been a tradition my parents made up, it was always meant to spark joy in others too,” Bryan added. “And with the show, alongside the Hanukkah Fairy, we hope to do just that.”
Hanukkah starts this year on the evening of Sunday, Dec. 18, and Fuchs welcomes visitors to come by, enjoy the decorations and take pictures. Located in Brooklyn on East 14th Street between Avenues J and K, her house will be the one all lit up with Hanukkah gear. “You can’t miss it,” she said.
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The post The ‘Hanukkah House’ in Brooklyn is a family tradition and a neighborhood treasure appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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A chance for the descendants of Holocaust victims to reclaim a piece of the past
Levi Buxbaum boarded the S.S. St. Louis on May 13, 1939, both relieved and hopeful. Relieved to be leaving Nazi Germany behind, hopeful that he would soon reunite with his daughters. But 14 days later, when the ship arrived in Havana, most of its passengers were denied entry.
Refused safe harbor in Cuba, the United States and Canada, the refugees were forced to return to Europe. That June, Buxbaum and 222 other passengers disembarked in France. Discouraged but undeterred, he clung to the hope that he would eventually secure a visa to America.
It was not to be. Sometime between Nov. 6 and Nov. 8, 1942, Buxbaum died aboard a transport bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau. Until recently, that was all Bonnie Elkaim knew about her great-grandfather.
Now, thanks to the Center for Jewish History’s newly launched initiative, “Histories and Mysteries,” Elkaim knows what happened between Buxbaum’s arrival in France in 1939 and his death three years later. The project helps families investigate Holocaust-era cold cases through crowdsourced genealogy, expert archival research and community collaboration.
“I’m extremely grateful that I filled in some of the pieces. I didn’t want my great-grandfather to just be a statistic,” Elkaim, 58, told me in a Zoom interview.
The initiative was made possible by a nearly $300,000 grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, or the Claims Conference. Since the project was launched in January, genealogists at CJH have received nearly 50 inquiries from the United States, Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom, and Canada, and have begun work on 11 cases.
“This project brings together passed-down family stories and the irreplaceable truth found in the archive. By taking part in this work, each person helps restore histories stolen in the Holocaust and gives families a chance to reclaim pieces of their past,” said Jenny Rappaport, head genealogist at the Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute.
Elkaim’s story will be the first shared publicly, released in weekly social media posts through July 31.
Miriam Frankel, CJH’s director of social media, said she hopes the project’s collaborative nature will resonate with audiences.
“What I love about the project is the communal aspect and being able to steward these stories into the digital world and affirm that they matter,” Frankel said.
The idea for the project grew out of the family history of Ilana Rosenbluth, CJH’s communications director.
When Nazi Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Rosenbluth’s father, then four years old, was living with his parents in eastern Poland. By month’s end, the country had been divided between Germany and the Soviet Union.
Rosenbluth’s family fled eastward, moving from Lvov to Siberia and eventually Uzbekistan, where food was scarce and disease rampant. During that time, her grandmother gave birth to a daughter, Lucia, known as Lucy, who later died of starvation.
In 1943, desperate to support his family, Rosenbluth’s grandfather boarded a train carrying bolts of fabric and disappeared.
“There are varying accounts of what happened to him, but the truth is my family has never had closure,” Rosenbluth said, adding that this initiative may be the last chance for us, and people like us to find answers.
As the number of living witnesses declines, preserving Holocaust history has taken on new urgency, said Gideon Taylor, president of the Claims Conference.
“We’re at a unique moment in time in terms of Holocaust memory and education. Fewer and fewer people have direct knowledge of it,” Taylor said.
A 2020 Claims Conference survey found that 63% of Americans do not know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and nearly half cannot name a single one of the more than 400,000 camps and ghettos that existed across Europe.
Elkaim, a retired New York City teacher, says she first learned about the Holocaust when she was nine years old.
“I only knew a few limited facts. I knew my grandparents had survived and my great-grandfather hadn’t. My grandmother felt a lot of survivor guilt and didn’t talk about it, and people didn’t ask questions then,” she said.
Now an educator and guide at CJH’s Anne Frank exhibition, Elkaim spent years searching for fragments of information that might transform her great-grandfather from an abstraction into a living, breathing person.
“I wanted to feel a connection with him,” she said.
When Rappaport received Elkaim’s inquiry, she immediately began contacting archivists in Germany and France. She also worked with CJH partner organizations, including the Leo Baeck Institute and YIVO, which held a census record from the General Union of French Israelites. The document placed Buxbaum in Vienne, France, between 1941 and 1942 and showed that he was unemployed. Rappaport also combed databases such as Ancestry.com, which contains extensive German vital records.
“Sometimes a single clue can rewrite an entire family story,” Rappaport said.
In Elkaim’s case, it was three clues.
The first breakthrough was the death record of Elkaim’s great-grandmother, Pauline Rothschild Buxbaum, which confirmed that he was in Kassel, Germany, on March 24, 1939.
Next came his 1876 German birth record, which verified his identity across multiple French documents.
Finally, a typed marriage record for Levi Buxbaum and Pauline Rothschild further confirmed the timeline, placing him definitively in Germany shortly before his flight from Nazi persecution.
Piece by piece, Rappaport reconstructed what followed.
In September 1939, Buxbaum was interned as an “enemy alien” at Camp du Ruchard, a former convalescence hospital for Belgian soldiers after World War I. He lived as a refugee for four years before being arrested and transferred to the Drancy internment camp. All the while he never stopped trying to get to America.
The last document bearing his name appears on Transport 42 from Drancy to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“He either died on the transport or immediately after arriving. There’s no way to know exactly. But I admire him so much and how hard he fought to survive,” Elkaim said.
The post A chance for the descendants of Holocaust victims to reclaim a piece of the past appeared first on The Forward.
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Jews and other minorities face similar levels of campus hostility, Brandeis survey finds
The first academic study comparing the experience of Jewish students on college campuses to that of other minority groups found that Jews and other marginalized populations, including Black and Muslim students, face comparable levels of discrimination.
The findings were part of a national survey involving thousands of respondents focused on antisemitism that also polled student attitudes toward other identity groups.
Nearly half of Jewish students said they had experienced at least one antisemitic incident during the current academic year — mostly seeing offensive graffiti or posters — but when it came to the overall campus climate Jews were slightly less likely than Muslims, and slightly more likely than Black students, to say that their campus was a hostile environment.
“Everybody is walking around with a chip on their shoulder,” said Leonard Saxe, director of the Cohen Center of Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, which produced the study released Tuesday. “Addressing prejudice toward protected groups is perhaps seen as a zero- sum game: ‘If we pay attention to Black students that’s taking away from what we can do for Jewish students, but paying attention to Jewish students means not paying attention to Muslim students.’”
While a flurry of research about campus antisemitism followed the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel and the college protests of the Gaza war that followed, few have sought to determine whether Jews are facing more or less discrimination than other students.
But the Brandeis study tracks with a less scientific study commissioned by the antisemitism task force at Columbia University in which high levels of both Jewish and Muslim students said they had felt endangered on campus amid protests related to the Gaza war.
In the Brandeis report, Jewish students were most likely to express concern related to traditional antisemitic stereotypes (62%) and antisemitism from the political right (60%) while fewer said they were worried about antisemitism related to Israel (45%) or coming from the left (also 45%).
When it came to college students overall, 9% showed a pattern of hostility toward Jews, meaning they were likely to agree with a series of antisemitic statements, compared to 17% who exhibited what researchers called “anti-Black resentment.”
Muslim, Black and Hispanic students, and those who identified as liberal or moderate, were the most likely to agree with negative statements about Jews, while white, Muslim and conservative students were most likely to agree with anti-Black views.
“It means that we need to target some of our interventions — educational interventions — to these groups if we want to have effects,” Saxe said. “If you only engage the Caucasian students, you’re not going to be addressing the problem.”
Jewish students expressed some of the lowest levels of prejudice toward other groups, according to the study, but 18% expressed “anti-Black resentment” while 3% were categorized as expressing hostility toward Jews.
The report also found that strident hostility toward Israel — opposing Israel’s “right to exist” and avoiding peers who support a Jewish state in Israel — did not neatly correlate to holding antisemitic views.
Half of “extremely liberal” students agreed with those statements about Israel but overall the very liberal population was least likely to express a pattern of hostility toward Jewish students. Very few moderate or conservative students expressed those negative views about Israel, but both groups were more likely to agree with anti-Jewish statements.
The 14% of Jewish students who agreed with the anti-Israel statements was similar to the number of students from other backgrounds who did.
The study was conducted during the fall semester last year. Researchers polled 3,989 undergraduate students at four-year colleges and universities in the U.S. through an online survey fielded by Generation Lab that included an oversample of 743 Jewish students.
The post Jews and other minorities face similar levels of campus hostility, Brandeis survey finds appeared first on The Forward.
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Rubio Says ‘Historic’ Israel-Lebanon Talks Should Outline Framework for Peace
Smoke rises after an Israeli strike, amid escalating hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, as the US-Israeli conflict with Iran continues, in southern Lebanon, March 24, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted a rare meeting between Israeli and Lebanese envoys in Washington on Tuesday, saying he hoped the two countries would agree to a framework for a peace process, even as Israel pressed its war on Hezbollah.
The two countries went into their first direct negotiations since 1983 with conflicting agendas, with Israel ruling out discussion of a ceasefire and demanding Beirut disarm Hezbollah, an Iran-backed terrorist group based in Lebanon that seeks Israel’s destruction.
But the presence of Rubio, President Donald Trump’s top diplomat and national security adviser, signaled Washington’s desire to see progress.
CRITICAL JUNCTURE IN MIDDLE EAST CRISIS
The meeting comes at a critical juncture in the conflict in the Middle East, a week into a fragile ceasefire between the United States, Israel, and Iran.
Iran says Israel‘s campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon must be included in any agreement to end the wider war, complicating talks mediated by Pakistan aimed at averting further economic fallout.
The conflict that began with US-Israeli strikes on Iran on Feb. 28 has led to a major oil supply disruption, piling pressure on Trump to find an off-ramp.
Rubio opened the meeting between Israel‘s ambassador to the US, Yechiel Leiter, and his Lebanese counterpart, Nada Hamadeh Moawad, saying he hoped the talks could begin a process to permanently end the conflict in Lebanon and prevent Hezbollah, which he called a “terrorist proxy of Iran,” from threatening Israel.
The meeting marked a rare encounter between representatives of governments that have remained technically in a state of war since the modern state of Israel was established in 1948.
“This is a process, not an event. This is more than just one day. This will take time, but we believe it is worth this endeavor, and it’s a historic gathering that we hope to build on. And the hope today is that we can outline the framework upon which a permanent, lasting peace can be developed,” Rubio said.
Rubio was hosting Tuesday’s talks amid questions over his lack of in-person participation in talks with Iran, with the Republican president sending Vice President JD Vance to Islamabad over the weekend to lead the US negotiations.
Rubio was with Trump in Florida watching a mixed martial arts event as Vance announced in Pakistan that talks with the Iranians had concluded with no breakthrough.
State Department Counselor Michael Needham, US ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz, and US ambassador to Lebanon Michel Issa, a personal friend of Trump, were also participating in the talks on Tuesday.
LEBANON SEEKS CEASEFIRE
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun said in a statement on X as the meeting started that he hoped it would “mark the beginning of ending the suffering of the Lebanese people in general, and the southerners in particular.”
The Lebanese government led by Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam has called for negotiations with Israel despite objections from Hezbollah, reflecting worsening tensions between the Shi’ite Muslim group and its opponents.
Hezbollah opened fire in support of Tehran on March 2, sparking an Israeli offensive that has killed more than 2,000 people and forced 1.2 million from their homes, according to Lebanese authorities. Most of those killed have been Hezbollah terrorists, according to Israeli tallies.
Lebanese officials have said Moawad only has authority to discuss a ceasefire in Tuesday’s meeting.
But Israeli government spokesperson Shosh Bedrosian said Israel would not discuss a ceasefire.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar told reporters in Jerusalem ahead of the meeting that talks would focus on the disarmament of Hezbollah, which he said must take place before Israel and Lebanon could sign any peace agreement and normalise relations.
He said Hezbollah was a problem for Israel‘s security and Lebanon‘s sovereignty that needed to be addressed to move relations to a different phase. “We want to reach peace and normalization with the state of Lebanon,” he said.
The Lebanese state has been seeking to disarm Hezbollah peacefully since a war between the terrorist group and Israel in 2024. Efforts by Lebanon to disarm it by force risk igniting conflict in a country shattered by civil war from 1975 to 1990. Moves against Hezbollah by a Western-backed government in 2008 prompted a short civil war.
The current government banned Hezbollah’s military wing after it opened fire on Israel last month.