Menorahs to light up the night starting Sunday

Sunday is the first night of Hanukkah, the eight-night Jewish Festival of Lights, and the community is invited to several free public menorah lightings. Among the nearby celebrations are:

Laguna Beach

Chabad Laguna Beach will host family fun at Main Beach leading to the lighting of a menorah made of surfboards. Festivities begin at 2 p.m., and include a ventriloquist, dreidel cookie decorating, latkes and gelt.

Newport Beach

Fashion Island and the Chabad Center for Jewish Life will light a menorah and make merry with crafts, a children’s choir and balloon animals. The ceremony also will honor eight Holocaust survivors — one representing each decade since “Kristallnacht,” or the “Night of Broken Glass,” in which Nazis in Germany torched synagogues, vandalized Jewish homes, schools and businesses and killed nearly 100 Jews in November 1938. Sunday’s event starts at 3:30 p.m. in Fashion Island’s Atrium Garden Court near Dick’s Sporting Goods.

Huntington Beach

Chabad of West Orange County is teaming with the Huntington Beach Fire Department to drop chocolate gelt coins from a ladder truck at its menorah lighting. The event starts at 5:30 p.m. at Chabad of West Orange County, 5052 Warner Ave.

hillary.davis@latimes.com

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