When Brookline local Marika Shosh Feuerstein painted a menorah for her grandfather in 2016, she couldn’t have expected it would one day end up in the nation’s capital, lit by Vice President Kamala Harris and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff. But before Hanukkah, she received that very request from their staff, and later saw pictures on Twitter of the couple observing the holiday with her family’s menorah.
Harris and Emhoff sought out Marika Feuerstein’s menorah because it was used by her grandfather, Aaron Feuerstein, a Massachusetts factory owner who gained fame in the late 1990s for continuing to pay his workers after his factory burned down.
“I was blown away and shocked that I was even getting that call to begin with, but it was really moving to me that they wanted to honor him,” Marika Feuerstein said.
The Feuerstein family all light Hanukkah candles together, but this year was the first without Aaron, who passed away last month at 95. “It has been a dark time for us, so this really brought us a lot of happiness,” his granddaughter said.
Aaron was born in Brookline in 1925, where he died in November. He attended Boston Latin School and was a member and senior advisor of Young Israel, an Orthodox Temple in Brookline that his father founded.
Young Israel Rabbi David Hellman described him as a “living legend” at the synagogue, where Hellman said he attended Shabbat every week. Hellman called the Feuerstein family a ”founding pillar” of the Boston Jewish community.
In 1995, when a fire threatened the future of Malden Mills in Lawrence — a week before Hanukkah — Aaron spent millions paying his workers until the factory could be rebuilt.
“I’m not throwing 3,000 people out of work two weeks before Christmas,” he told the Boston Globe in the aftermath of the fire.
The decision to keep workers employed and rebuild the factory in Lawrence, where it was a major town employer, went against manufacturing trends at a time when many owners were relocating factories south or overseas to take advantage of cheap labor. Feuerstein’s grandfather had opened the factory in 1906, and it remained in the family for three generations until it was sold in the early 2000s.
Feuerstein became a national hero for his decision, the Globe dubbing him the “Mensch of Malden Mills.” Boston University, along with other universities and organizations, gave him honorary degrees and awards, and former President Bill Clinton honored him as a guest at the State of the Union Address in 1996.
Hellman said Aaron’s kindness extended far beyond the famous factory fire. “There are so many stories about individuals who he helped privately, quietly,” he said. “Whether it was one of the thousands of people who work for him, or he would hear that the spouse of an employee was having a hard time or had a medical expense or whatever, and he wouldn’t pay that, or the child of an employee wanted to go to college but couldn’t afford it. ... He lived his entire life like that.”
Marika described her grandfather as a “really strong Democrat,” but noted that Emhoff and Harris lighting the menorah has brought unity across political divides in her community.
“Everything’s so polarized, and I always say I have friends on both ends of the spectrum politically,” she said. “It made me so happy because even the people who are very far to the right thought it was amazing.”
Despite the first Hanukkah party in the White House occurring in 2001, this is the first year a Jewish person has celebrated the holiday within the vice president’s residence, with Emhoff being the first Jewish person to occupy his role. (No Jewish person has ever been president, vice president or first lady.)
Hellerman said Aaron embodied what it meant to be Jewish in the United States. “Aaron, on the one hand, was incredibly proud of being Jewish, and was incredibly dedicated to his community and to living and continuing Jewish tradition,” he said. “But he also was equally proud of being an American.”
Marika saw her grandfather as representing the holiday. “He is the ultimate symbol of Hanukkah and that you should always be proud of your heritage and your identity and your ethnicity no matter where you come from,” she said. “So for the vice president and the second gentleman to be honoring him with his menorah, it couldn’t be more perfect.”
