Knesset Menorah

The Knesset Menorah (Hebrew: מנורת הכנסת Menorat HaKnesset) is a bronze Menorah 4.30 meters high, 3.5 meters wide, and weighs 4 tons. It is located at the edge of Gan Havradim (Rose Garden) opposite the Knesset. It was designed by Benno Elkan (1877-1960), a Jewish sculptor who escaped from his native Germany to Britain. It was presented to the Knesset as a gift from the Parliament of the United Kingdom on April 15, 1956 in honor of the eighth anniversary of Israeli independence.

The Knesset Menorah was modeled after the golden candelabrum that stood in the Temple in Jerusalem. A series of bronze reliefs on the Menorah depict the struggles to survive of the Jewish people, depicting formative events, images and concepts from the Hebrew Bible and Jewish history. The engravings on the six branches of the Menorah portray episodes since the Jewish exile from Eretz Yisrael. Those on the center branch portray the fate of the Jews from the return to the land to the establishment of the State. It has been described as a visual "textbook" of Jewish history.

In 1950, a year and a half after Israel's Declaration of Independence, Edwin Samuel, son of the first British High Commissioner to Palestine, Herbert Samuel, approached the Jewish artist Benno Elkan and discussed with him the idea of offering as a gift to the young Israeli state a monumental bronze sculpture in the form of a menorah. The gift would symbolize the admiration of the British Parliament for the new state and its government. Elkan had left Germany in 1933 after the Nazi rise to power and had become a well known sculptor in England. He had experience working in bronze, having created ten large relief-decorated candelabra, among them two standing in the Westminster Abbey in London. The idea for such a Menorah had already formed in Elkan's mind in 1947, and he had begun to create the bronze reliefs in 1949. All in all he spent almost ten years on the project, much of it in research, because he wanted to create a unique work which would tell the millennia-old history of the nation of Israel.

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