Lighting the way: Sausalito marks first public menorah with call to unity after global attack

by Ruth Dusseault, Bay City News December 16, 2025December 17, 2025

Attendees of the inaugural Hanukkah candle lighting gather at Plaza Vina Del Mar in Sausalito on Monday, Dec. 15, 2025. The event took on added significance in the wake of a deadly terrorist attack on Hanukkah celebrants in Australia, on Sunday. (Ruth Dusseault/Bay City News)

THERE IS NO ACTIVE SYNAGOGUE in Sausalito, but there are Jewish people there. On Monday night, they were joined by over a hundred allies at the city’s first-ever public menorah lighting and Hanukkah celebration.

The 10-foot electric icon was purchased by Councilmember Melissa Blaustein and her husband and erected next to the city’s Christmas tree at Vina del Mar Park. The celebration included music, tributes, prayers, dreidels and latkes.

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Ruth Dusseault, Bay City News

Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.

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