The festival of Hanukkah (also transliterated as Chanukah) means “dedication.” It is the post-biblical festival of lights, which celebrates the re-dedication of the Temple altar to Jewish worship by the Maccabees (translated most frequently as “hammer”). It begins on the twenty-fifth of Kislev and is an
eight-day commemoration of the victory of the Maccabees in 165 B.C.E. over the Seleucid rulers of Palestine. The latter had desecrated the Temple and imposed their Hellenistic religion on the Jews.
The Maccabees wanted to rekindle the candelabrum but found only one small jar of ritually pure olive oil with the seal of the high Priest. This oil continued to burn miraculously for eight days, enabling them to prepare new pure oil.
To remember this miracle, an ascending series of lights in an eight-branched lamp are kindled each night. The lights are placed in the doorway or windows of the home to ‘publicize the miracle.’ The message of the story is that God enables something pure, however small it may seem, to give light well beyond its natural potential. For the mystics, the Hanukkah lights were seen as a manifestation of the hidden light of the Messiah.
Foods fried in oil, such as latkes (potato pancakes) and soofganiyot (doughnuts) are customarily eaten and children are often given gifts of money (Hanukkah gelt). They frequently play with a four-sided spinning top known in Yiddish as a dreidl.
American Jews are most familiar with a small box of Israeli Chanuka candles. Few are aware that Ze’ev Raban, a European trained artist who taught at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Palestine, designed the box. However, images featuring the Hanukkah Lamp began much earlier. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, prints showing the kindling of the Hanukkah Lamp were part of widely distributed booklets on Jewish customs. In the nineteenth century, Moritz Oppenheim (considered the first modern Jewish artist) created a series of nostalgic paintings, reproduced in a book as Pictures of Old-Time Jewish Family Life. Influenced by Oppenheim’s book, a painting by Felsenhardt shows the interior of a Polish home at this holiday.
Wooden dreidls from nineteenth-century Europe contrast with contemporary dreidls by American and Israeli artists. A photograph follows showing the different ethnic backgrounds of Israeli kindergarteners lighting the Hanukkah lamp. In the 1960s, the noted Jewish-American artist, Ben Shahn, emphasized the point that we are only to look at the Chanukah lights in order to give thanks for miracles, deliverances, and wonders and not to use them for any other purpose. A contemporary photographer, Bill Aron, captures the custom of placing the Hanukkah lamp in front of a window for public viewing. The Central Conference of American Rabbis (Reform) commissioned Leonard Baskin to create a series of paintings in their home guide for the celebration of Hanukkah. More recently, Malcah Zeldis, a naïve artist, pictured her family around a table centered on the Hanukkah lamp.
The presentation continues with an overview of Hanukkah lamps from the 14th century in Italy to Germany, Morocco, Central Europe, Danzig/Gdansk, Brody, France, Baghdad, Damascus, Iraq, Yemen, Eretz Yisrael, Bezalel, and many contemporary creations. The eighteenth-century workshop of Valentin Schuler depicts the important detail of Judith and the Head of Holofernes, while one from Eastern Europe is a zoological menagerie. The styles range from Renaissance to Horror Vacuii to Neoclassic to exuberant and unique contemporary approaches in silver, glass, stoneware, wood, and stone. Bench type Hanukkah lamps are predominant, though a variety of unusual designs are included. The presentation ends with a calligraphic painting of Hanukkah and the design of an American Hanukkah stamp, issued simultaneously in Israel.
