Hanukkah in New York City

Hanukkah 2026 runs from sundown on December 4 to December 12. Listings below cover December 4 through December 12.

Eight nights, and the city marks them in public: a thirty-foot menorah on Grand Army Plaza, klezmer in the clubs, latkes anywhere that will have them. Concert listings for Hanukkah are always thin, so most of this page is the rest of it.

In Brooklyn 1 listing

The public lightings

New York does Hanukkah outdoors. The largest menorah in the world stands at Grand Army Plaza on the southeast corner of Central Park, at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street. Guinness World Records puts it at 32 feet. It is lit publicly each of the eight nights, and the first night draws a crowd worth seeing.

Height and location confirmed against Sinclair/WJLA reporting from December 2023 quoting Guinness. The lighting schedule shifts with the dates each year, so check the current year's times rather than trusting this page for them.

Brooklyn has its own at Grand Army Plaza in Prospect Heights, which confuses visitors every year: two Grand Army Plazas, two menorahs, one in each borough. The Brooklyn one is the Chabad lighting at the arch.

Why the concert listings are thin, and what to do about it

Hanukkah is a home holiday, and the music that belongs to it mostly happens in houses and shuls rather than in ticketed rooms. What does turn up on a concert calendar is klezmer, and New York is the best klezmer city in the world outside of a few square miles of Eastern Europe that no longer play it. Watch the Lower East Side and the smaller Brooklyn rooms through December. The Center for Traditional Music and Dance and the 92nd Street Y both program it most years.

If this page is empty when you land on it, that is accurate rather than broken. Rooms announce December bills in October and November, so it fills in on its own.

The dates, through 2035

Hanukkah moves against the civil calendar, and most listings get it wrong by a day because the holiday begins at sundown. The windows used on this page run from first candle to the eighth day. They are hard-coded through 2035 rather than calculated, so they are right, and when the table runs out this page says so instead of inventing a date.

Hanukkah 2027

December 24 through january 1, 2028. The listings and everything above land on this same page when the time comes, so there is nothing new to find and nothing to bookmark again.

Running something for hanukkah in New York that is not here? Send it over. Every submission is read by hand, and if we list you we would love a link back.