Holiday Features

This Unique Hanukkah Program Celebrates A World Of Jewish Miracles

By Larry Luxner

Ten years ago, Illya Buzunov never could have imagined that one day he’d be teaching Jews around the world how to prepare potato latkes.

Until 2014, the Ukraine native didn’t even know he was Jewish.

But that’s exactly what Buzunov, 24, will be doing on November 30 — the third night of Hanukkah — as part of a new video event series that brings together Jews from a variety of countries for Hanukkah candle lighting celebrations and an inside look at their communities. Each night, Jews from a different location around the globe will light candles as a part of the series, which highlights an aspect of local Jewish music, dance or cuisine, as well as the location’s Jewish history.

The global Chanukah campaign is part of an effort by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the massive global Jewish humanitarian organization known as JDC, to highlight Jewish communities worldwide.

“I’ll demonstrate how to make latkes using a traditional recipe of potatoes, eggs, salt, baking powder and oil,” said Buzunov, who coordinates Active Jewish Teens, JDC’s teen network across the former Soviet Union, at the JDC-sponsored Halom Jewish community center in Kyiv, Ukraine. The network is organized in partnership with Genesis Philanthropy Group and is part of the BBYO youth movement. “It’s one of the easiest things you can do for Hanukkah,” he said.

JDC’s Hanukkah series, “A Great Miracle Happened Here,” will be livestreamed each night at 7 p.m. ET on JDC’s event site, chanukah. jdc.org, as well as on its Facebook page. The events kick off Nov. 28 in New York with a segment hosted by author Dara Horn and featuring special guests including ChineseJewish celebrity Molly Yeh, who hosts the Food Network’s “Girl Meets Farm” TV show.

Subsequent nights will feature Jewish communities in Morocco, Ukraine, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel and Poland. The series concludes Dec. 5 with a broadcast from Latin America hosted by Analucia Lopezrevoredo of Jewtina y Co, an organization that seeks to nurture and celebrate Latin-Jewish community, identity, leadership and resiliency.

The aim of this first-of-its-kind project, said Heather Morgan, JDC’s managing director of global marketing and communications, is to use the Jewish holiday to raise awareness of JDC’s own work worldwide — now in its 107th year.

“We’ve been involved in almost every monumental event in modern Jewish history, but there’s a disconnect between the primacy of JDC as an organization and how much people really know about us,” Morgan said. “We thought this would be a great opportunity to raise awareness and visibility by linking ourselves with the Hanukkah narrative, which in so many ways parallels JDC’s own narrative.”

Since its founding in 1914, the organization has provided urgent and non-urgent humanitarian aid to Jews and others in more than 70 countries worldwide, from Argentina to Uzbekistan.

In just this last year, JDC has assisted earthquake victims in Haiti,

See JEWISH MIRACLES on Page 18