If you called it a German toy factory, the East Hartford, Connecticut, machinists would probably just shrug and carry on. Horst Engineering doesn’t make toys for a living. It produces jet engine fasteners, pistons, pins, and bolts—the unglamorous hardware that prevents aircraft from disintegrating at 30,000 feet. However, the name on the door actually originates in Germany.
The company’s founder arrived at Ellis Island in 1938 as Horst Rolf Liebenstein, a German Jewish immigrant who, like a lot of people landing in America that decade, decided a new name might serve him better. Harry Livingston was his new name. His grandson Scott Livingston currently oversees a precision machine shop that has spent decades cutting tolerances tight enough for aircraft components. Three generations later, his family is still in charge of the company.
Then came 2020, and air travel basically stopped. Connecticut’s aerospace corridor, which depends heavily on commercial flight volume, took a real hit. All of a sudden, CNC machines that had spent years cutting stainless steel and titanium for aircraft that no one was flying were left idle. Somebody remembered an old “Family Day” demo from a few years earlier, when the shop spun up a few dreidels just to show employees’ kids how the equipment worked. It appeared worthwhile to give it another go, this time for actual clients.
They did not construct a toy in the traditional sense. The body is made from twelve-foot bars of titanium, stainless steel, or aluminum that are turned by a CNC Swiss screw machine. The stem gets rolled threads instead of cut ones, a process borrowed straight from jet engine fasteners and, oddly enough, Formula 1 racing parts, because rolled threads run roughly fifty percent stronger than threads that are simply machined away. The grip is diamond-knurled on the same type of apparatus that handles surgical instruments. This is not the language of a typical toy store. It’s a term from the aerospace industry used to describe something that spins for thirty seconds on a tabletop.
The Dreidel’s somewhat ridiculous reputation as one of the most “aerodynamically” engineered toys ever created stems from this overlap. It was never put through a wind tunnel. However, the two-piece design is balanced with the same precision habits the shop uses for flight hardware, and the outcome actually spins more steadily and for a longer period of time than a cheap plastic one could. That degree of fixation on a kid’s gambling game is almost comical, and it’s difficult to avoid thinking the engineers were more amused by the joke than by the workmanship.
Even the manufacturers were taken aback by how quickly the titanium batch sold out. When collectors and Judaica stores noticed, the dreidel subtly joined a small, peculiar niche of reimagined dreidels, such as twenty-sided dice versions, fidget-spinner mashups, and designers using a four-sided top as a blank canvas because Hanukkah’s rules never specified how it had to look.
It remains to be seen if Horst will continue to produce dreidels once the aerospace sector is once again booming. It might end up as a permanent side line, or it might fade into one of those odd footnotes from a strange year, remembered mainly by the people who still have one spinning in a drawer somewhere. Either way, there’s something quietly satisfying about a company built on an immigrant’s name finding its way, almost by accident, back to something playful.