Lindo lamp
silver Chanukah menorah

The Lindo lamp is a silver Chanukah menorah. It is the oldest known example of a Chanukah menorah made in Britain.
History
The lamp was created by London silversmith John Ruslen in 1709. It was commissioned to celebrate the marriage of Elias Lindo and Rachel Lopes Ferreira. The couple were married at London's Bevis Marks Synagogue on February 2, 1708–09.
The lamp has been on loan to the London Jewish Museum, which has displayed it for 77 years, since the day the museum opened in 1932. The lamp is considered to be among the most important objects in the museum's collection. It is feared that if sufficient funds cannot be raised to purchase the lamp, it will be purchased by a private collector and disappear from public view. If the Museum, which is undergoing a major renovation, manages to raise sufficient funds to purchase the menorah, it will be on view in a new gallery entitled "Judaism: A Living Faith", designed to display the museum's "magnificent" collection of Jewish ceremonial art. The Museum's collection of ceremonial art has been awarded "designated" status by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council in recognition of its outstanding national importance.
“Lindo lamp” enters the record as silver Chanukah menorah. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Lindo, lamp and silver can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Lindo lamp” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Lindo, lamp and silver provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 14, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q6552585. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1709, 1708 and 1932.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lindo lamp” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.