Over 150 people came together on Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem for the first ever flash mob celebrating the Festival of Lights.
The song is “Chanukah Hey Ya!” by Eric Schwartz; the first documented Chanukah flash mob was in 2009, but it seems the new tradition has been repeated in subsequent years as well. Nefesh B’Nefesh, a non-profit organization that helps promote aliyah from North America and Great Britain, helped organize the original event in 2009.
“I had never done a flash mob before, but then again, they had no idea at all how to organize it,” says Marvin Casey, a St. Louis, Missouri native who found his way to Israel and helped choreograph the original event according to Haaretz. “They wanted to use ‘Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel’ as the song; I said, ‘There is no way on God’s great earth I am choreographing a dance to that.’”
So he agreed to choreograph the flash mob to the song of “Chanukah Hey Ya!” (a remix of a 2003 OutKast song titled “Hey Ya!”) and trained the dance participants just an hour before filming the dance publicly.
Written by Erin Parfet
