Explore the values behind Chanukah

By Alicia Feldman, PJ Library & PJ Our Way Coordinator

Deepen your family’s Chanukah experience beyond the gelt and glitz and gifts. These eight values — community, conservation, courage, education, Israel, light, miracles and rededication — are derived from the story of Chanukah, with pieces for learning, asking, doing and reading.

Choose to explore as many values as you’d like. You can go in order, or skip around as desired, but we recommend ending with rededication.

Note to parents

Consider reading the night’s value through first to be familiar with it and decide if there are parts where you’d change the words to suit your child’s developmental level. Use a variety of questions that would best work for your family’s discussion.

For each of these eight values of Chanukah, we suggest your family can:

1) Learn: description of the holiday value

2) Ask: questions to discuss as a family (for a “fireside chat”)

3) Do: activities to do together

4) Read: PJ Library books Check out www.jconnect.org/ families/pj-library/chanukah-values for more suggestions:

Chanukah fun facts

• Hanukkah is Hebrew for “to dedicate.”

• It can be spelled many ways including Chanukah, Chanukkah and Hanukkah.

• Some people call it the Festival of Lights or Festival of Dedication.

• Gift-giving wasn’t originally part of the holiday, but children were given gelt (chocolate coins) money as incentive for studying the Torah. Gifts were added because the holiday is close to Christmas.

• Many traditional foods served on Chanukah are fried in oil to symbolize the miracle of the oil burning for eight nights.

• Traditional Chanukah foods include potato pancakes, called latkes; noodle or potato casserole, called kugel; gelt (chocolate coins); and jelly doughnuts, called sufaniyot.

• 17.5 million donuts are eaten in Israel during Hanukkah.