With Hanukkah approaching on Tuesday at sundown, Jewish Engineering Society co-presidents Shachar and Etay Luz decided it was time for their new club to start a new tradition: building electric menorahs.

About 15 students from the society gathered in the Siebel Center on Sunday night to construct the menorahs, which Shacher Luz, a senior in engineering, had designed himself.

“We’re engineers, so we decided we wanted to do something with electricity,” said junior in engineering Etay Luz. “So we decided that we would combine our electric skills with our Judaism. “

The executive board of the Jewish Engineering Society, which was founded by the Luz brothers over the summer, spent hours designing a model in which eight “candles,” made out of PVC pipes and LED lamps could be lit by touching them with a ninth candle.

“We’re really excited to see how this turns out,” Etay Luz said. “Especially since no one has really done anything like this before, there’s really no existing design for it.”

After designing the menorah, the executive board spent Saturday night and Sunday afternoon cutting PVC pipes, stripping wires, and testing the model to make sure it worked before the members arrived to create the menorahs. Graduate student Stephen Kloder said he hoped building the menorahs would be fairly easy, although it could take several hours.

“We are going to have the experts of the project start doing the hard parts and hopefully doing the easier parts won’t take as long,” Kloder said.

The Jewish Engineering Society usually hosts speakers, and is hoping to branch out into other activities to help unite Jewish students, as well as to spread multicultural awareness throughout campus, Etay Luz said. While some of their speakers have garnered fairly large audiences, only nine students came to build menorahs on Monday night. Kloder said that was about the number they were hoping for, since they bought all the supplies with their own money.

“For this type of event, this is a good turnout,” he said. “If it was any bigger, we wouldn’t be able to handle it.”

Students can join the society even if they are not Jewish or in engineering, Etay Lutz said, but most of the students in the society are Jewish.

“For some of these students, this is their only connection to Judaism,” Etay Luz said. “It’s always fun to meet new people that I don’t see at synagogue or Hillel.”

Jeremy Glassenberg, a junior in engineering, said he hopes this will start a new tradition for the society.

“It was not a question of what to make for us, it would obviously be a menorah,” Glassenberg said. “The question was just in what style we would make it.”