Family Creates Huge LED Menorah

By COLlive reporter

Chanukah begins next week, but at one Chabad family it’s been celebrated for a full year.

For the last 12 months, the Menorah had a constant presence in the home and minds of the chassidic and techie Forta family who live in Oak Park, Michigan.

They’ve been working on building a huge animated LED menorah powered by a Raspberry Pi, the credit card-sized single-board computer developed in the United Kingdom and used to learn programming through fun and practical projects.

“We started planning this right after last Chanukah and worked on the project on and off since then,” says the father, Ben Forta, who is the Senior Director of Education Initiatives of Adobe Systems.

“My kids and I have created simpler Chanukah displays in previous years, but this year they wanted to do something big and ambitious, something that would get noticed,” he told COLlive.com. “Pirsumei Nisa pretty much requires that.”

Pirsumei Nisa, Aramaic for publicizing the miracle, is one of the guiding principles of the holiday of Chanukah. Lighting a Menorah in public reminds Jews about G-d’s miracles that led to the rededication of the Second Beis Hamikdash.

“I’ve created lots of different menorahs over the years, starting as a bochur in Yeshivas Lubavitch Manchester in the mid-80’s,” Forta said. Later, during a Shlichus year at Yeshiva Ohr Elchanan Chabad in Los Angeles, he experimented building various Menorahs.

While studying in the Beis Medrash Oholei Torah in Crown Heights, Forta was part of the group that took a Menorah to the Statue of Liberty and was pictured in the Chanukah album book “Let There Be Light.”

For this project, he involved his children: Shmuel Forta, 19, Eli Forta, 16, Daniel Forta, 15, and Ezra Forta, 12. Together, they transformed their garage and living room into a lab while not neglecting their daily chores of school and work. When Shabbos came around, everything was put away.

The result is eye-catching and even tutorial. “We wanted this to be a fun project to see, but also use it to demonstrate the right way to light the menorah,” Ben Forta says.

“Our menorah knows when Chanukah is,” he explained. “On each day of Chanukah, it displays the right number of candles and animates the correct lighting sequence. Before and after Chanukah it animates all days, from 1 to 8, and then repeats.”

He says the project wasn’t expensive with total materials costing a few hundred dollars. “But many hundreds of hours of time went into this, and the kids did lots of the work, learning lots about electronics and programming along the way.”

Dr. T. Hershel Gardin, President of Gardin Consulting Group, wrote to the Forta family on social media: “Wow! Tremendous. We watch it from our second floor, a block away.”

Forta’s 2-year-old grandchild Yisroel stars in the video about how it was made: