This year marks 40 years since the Lubavitcher Rebbe launched his Shabbos Candle-Lighting campaign in 1974. It’s also 40 years since my parents, Rabbi Yisroel and Rochel Rubin, moved to Albany NY on Sukkot of that year (Hoshana Rabba to be precise). My father shared about his memories of his “Shabbos Candle-Lighting Matchbooks” at a family gathering in the Shabbos House Sukkah to celebrate the 3rd birthday of our daughter Esther Miriam.
Just before moving to Albany in 1974, I (Rabbi Yisroel Rubin) was sitting in Frankel Shul on President Street in Crown Heights, thinking of the Rebbe’s new candle-lighting campaign, and it hit me that matchbooks are an easy handout and advertising medium. In those days, back when it was common for people to smoke, most restaurants and stores had free matchbooks on the counter and they often had advertising on them. Why not promote Shabbos candles?
When we arrived in Albany I spoke with Mr. Leo Phaff, a local communal activist and owner of National Business Promotions, which produced this very type of thing. Sarah Miram Levinson was an artist living in Albany at the time, and I asked her to make a line-art illustration for the matchbooks, with a mother and a daughter, and the two large and one small candlestick as the Rebbe strongly encouraged. We reprinted this many times, both for use in Albany, and for Chabad organizations elsewhere, with a total printing of about 50,000 matchbooks. Soon afterward, I received a Michtav Klali-Prati (a personalized general pastoral letter from the Rebbe) with a postscript of “Tach” the Rebbe’s succinct way of saying that he was pleased with the matchbooks.
Before the 11th of Nissan, the Rebbe’s birthday a year later in 1975 Rabbi Groner of the Rebbe’s Secretariat called me and asked if I had candlelighting matchbooks available immediately, because the Rebbe wanted to give them out. I had none available that would be ready in time! Instead they quickly prepared/printed just a few matchbooks with the words “Neiros Shabbos Kodesh” and the date: 11th of Nissan, 5735. The Rebbe initialed each of these matchbooks in his handwriting and gave them to the organizers of the candlelighting campaign headed by a Mrs. Esther Sternberg. It may have seemed possible from Rabbi Groner’s original call that the Rebbe may have originally wanted to give these out in a broader way had they been readily available.
With the societal changes with smoking, matchbooks fell out of vogue. But knowing the Rebbe’s appreciation for them, and being that they were one of our very first productions on the Rebbe’s Shlichus in Albany, we did a small updated reprint of these matchbooks as a souvenir for the wedding of my late, oldest daughter, Esther Aidel of blessed memory, to Mendel Cohen, may he live and be well.
Many at Shabbos House, especially those who remember the old house, will recall a black and white line-art sketch of a mother and daughter lighting Shabbat candles that hung above the area where we lit candles each week (near the sole window in the big room, on the other side of the wall from the small entranceway). That framed sketch was a gift to from a non-Jewish patron at the Kosher Pizza and Felafel store that Chabad operated on Washington Ave between 1975 and 1988. This man took the matchbook and made a full-scale drawing based on it. Remember, in those days, you couldn’t just make an oversized copy or a digital enlargement. A careful eye will notice a distinctive spelling mistake in the last Hebrew word: “Kodesh” which the artist spelled as “Koresh” because the Hebrew letters Daled and Reish look very similar and someone not familiar with Hebrew may not know the difference.
So that’s the story of the Neshek Shabbos Candelighting Matchbooks, which started in Albany NY.