Entertaining the Holidays
Supplement to Jewish News December 19, 2016 jewishnewsva.org | December 19, 2016 | Entertaining the Holidays | Jewish News | 17
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anukkah, the holiday of lights and latkes, begins this year on the evening of Saturday, December 24, otherwise known as Christmas Eve. You might recall that only three years ago, in 2013, Hanukkah landed on Thanksgiving, and the phrase, Happy Thanksgivukah! was coined. Oh, did we all have fun with that! I’m no rabbi, but since Hanukkah is one of the Jewish holidays best known for fun—it now even boasts some catchy tunes—the Festival of Lights lends itself to celebrating and sharing with others. And, that’s exactly what my family plans to do. To officially kick off the season, a friend who invites us on Christmas Eve each year to exchange gifts and see her always stunning tree with its hundreds of artful, delicate ornaments (she said it took three days to put together this year), asked if we could light the first candle of Hanukkah at her home. Of course! Every Christmas day, other good friends invite us to their home for a gourmet Christmas dinner. This year, our hostess asked us to bring latkes. Obviously, we said “Yes!” And, we’ll bring the sour cream, applesauce and a Hanukiah, too. How lucky we feel that our friends are interested in our traditions and are willing and want to share all of the holidays with us. For me, that’s the perfect reason to celebrate—to entertain and be with family and friends. I hope it is for you, too. Happy all of the holidays!
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18 | Jewish News | Entertaining the Holidays | December 19, 2016 | jewishnewsva.org
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Entertaining the Holidays
How Hanukkah sufganiyot became a national treat in the Netherlands Cnaan Liphshiz
AMSTERDAM (JTA)—Though they are considered a caloric hazard in Israel, sufganiyot are a rare Hanukkah treat for many Jews in Europe. When the holiday arrives, some Jewish communities in Russia, Ukraine and beyond arrange special community bakes. This keeps schools and kindergartens in supply of the jam-filled doughnuts that Jews deep-fry on Hanukkah in celebration of the legend involving the miraculous use of oil during the Maccabean revolt. Other communities arrange for shipments from Israel or buy the delicacy in the few kosher shops that sell them across the continent. But for Jews in the Netherlands, sufganiyot are a predictable dietary assault. Each winter they become as ubiquitous here as they are in Israel thanks to hundreds of food stalls across the country that sell a pastry known as “oliebollen,” or “oil bulbs,” every year from November to January. Prepared with raisins or without, oliebollen are usually sold with powdered sugar on top. “I often don’t bother to get real sufganiyot at a kosher shop,” says Tzippy Harmsen-Seffy, an Israel-born Dutch Jew from Amsterdam. “I just pick up a few oliebollen instead.” Whereas many cultures have sweet pastries made of deep-fried dough— including the German Berliner, which unlike oliebollen is eaten year-round and has sweet filling—few resemble sufganiyot quite as closely as oliebollen in terms of ingredients, recipe and the period of the year when they are traditionally
consumed. These similarities are not necessarily the result of coincidence, according to Jonah Freud, who published a book in 2012 about the Dutch Jewish cuisine based on her research for the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam. Like several other food historians in the Netherlands, Freud believes the current tradition of the oliebollen, which dates back to the late Middle Ages, may be rooted in the Jewish sufganiyah, which is likelier an older dish and is mentioned in Jewish sources even prior to the 13th century. While it would be difficult to credit with certainty any one cuisine for “a basic recipe of flour, yeast, eggs, water and oil,” she says, “there are nonetheless some influences in the oliebol that can likely be attributed to Jewish traditions.” One clue are early recipes for oliebollen from the Middle Ages, which have the dough fried in pig’s fat. “Jews would have likely swapped the pig’s fat for oil because pork isn’t kosher,” Freud says. “Eventually we ended up with the kosher variant, whereas no one fries oliebollen in pig fat today.” Another indication is the seasonal correlation between Hanukkah and oliebollen season. Oliebollen, Jonah noted, are not associated with Christmas. “It’s a seasonal food, not a holiday food,” she says. This is significant, food historians agree, because Dutch Christians probably would have been careful not to co-opt any Jewish customs into their own religious rituals. To be sure, there are competing theories
about the origins of the oliebol, including that it was invented by Germanic tribes in the Netherlands during Yule, a pagan winter holiday. But if the Dutch oliebol does have Jewish roots, it would not be the first typical Dutch food with such origins. The Jews of Amsterdam—a city so well-known for its Jewish history that it is also known as “mokum,” the Yiddish word for “place”—are widely credited for giving the Dutch capital its signature halfom sandwich, which consists of liver and corned beef. Before the Holocaust, some 140,000 Jews lived in the Netherlands, mostly in Amsterdam. Seventy-five percent of them were murdered. There is additional circumstantial evidence connecting the oliebol to the history of the sufganiyah. Jewish food historians believe the habit of injecting a sweet filling into the sufganiyah is a late influence that Ashkenazi Jews either invented or picked up in Germany, where bakeries for centuries have been selling the Berliner, a pastry that looks and tastes like the sufganiyot sold in Israel today. But the sufganiyot mentioned in Sephardic Jewish writings—including by Rabbi Maimon Ben Yossef, the father of the 13th-century philosopher Maimonides— had no fillings. Those are believed to have come later, as Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews mixed in the Diaspora, including in Poland. But to this day, some Sephardim in
Israel, France and Morocco spurn the jam filling that for many is the trademark of a good, traditional sufganiyah. Jonah says this gives credence to theories that oliebollen in their current form were brought to the Netherlands by Portuguese Sephardim who came here from the 15th century onward to escape religious persecution in the Iberian peninsula. Another indication: Dutch oliebol is often made with raisins, an ingredient that does not feature heavily in Dutch cuisine but was commonly used by Portuguese Jews. Many non-Jews in the Netherlands believe oliebollen are originally a Sephardic or Portuguese dish—a history they regard as common knowledge, even though it has never been proven. “I think it came from Portugal, Portuguese people brought it,” says Jan van Gelden, an Amsterdam entrepreneur who recently bought eight oliebollen at a stall in Amsterdam’s Museum Square. In Jewish circles, some oliebollen lovers here even insist they are superior to sufganiyot—and closer to the treat’s Sephardic origins. “If you consider Israeli store-bought sufganiyot original, then oliebollen are better because they’re fresher and smaller,” says Gili Gurel, another Israelborn Jewish resident of the Netherlands. But, she adds, compared to her grandmother’s recipe for homemade sufganiyot, “everything is inferior.”
jewishnewsva.org | December 19, 2016 | Entertaining the Holidays | Jewish News | 19
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Entertaining the Holidays
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LOS ANGELES ( JTA)—In the weeks before Hanukkah, with anticipation of the holiday brightly filling my mind, the darkening news of rising anti-Semitism in the U.S. began to filter in. As I pictured our menorahs burning in their usual place—the front windows of our home—a warning light began to blink. Though Hanukkah represents a victory of light over darkness—by the Maccabees over the Seleucid Empire, which resulted in the rededication of the Second Temple— recent events were causing me to rethink our window menorah lighting, turning me toward sharing our menorah kindling with only family and friends. But, surprisingly, like finding an extra Hanukkah candle in the box, a new U.S. Hanukkah postage stamp depicting a lit menorah in a window was an unexpected source of inspiration. For 17 years we’ve lived on a block where there are no other Jewish families. We’ve proudly placed our menorahs — whether lit by candle or by bulb — in our front windows, publicizing the miracle of the holiday both to our neighbors and ourselves. Saying the blessings and lighting the candles is a mitzvah, according to the Talmud, and by doing so, we were also recognizing the blessing of our freedom of religion and expressing our Jewish identity. In fact, it wasn’t really Hanukkah for me until I walked outside and, looking at the lit menorah emanating from my own window, affirmed that we had arrived to this time once again. Why was I worried now? Since the previous Hanukkah, nothing had changed in our multi-ethnic and
20 | Jewish News | Entertaining the Holidays | December 19, 2016 | jewishnewsva.org
multi-denominational neighborhood, a place where non-Jewish neighbors have wished me “Happy Hanukkah” and at Passover “gut yontif.” But in the uncertain light of political change in our country, I was worried about what was emerging from the shadows: anti-Semitic iconography online, attacks on Jewish journalists, the re-emergence of Jewish conspiracy stories, Jewish college students being confronted with swastikas. Was this a wise time to let our light shine? Helping to banish my second thoughts, however, was that new stamp. The
design—a traditional, branched menorah shown burning in a window against a background of falling snow—seemed innocuous enough, even unseasonably fanciful if you live in California, like me. But there it was, a government-issued reminder that in the window, where your neighbors can see it, is the place from which your menorah should send out its glow. Even so, a statement released by the Postal Service with the issue of the new stamp renewed my concerns when it reminded me that “at times in history when it was not safe for Jewish families to make a public declaration of faith,
the menorah was set instead in a prominent place inside the home.” Though the statement went on to say that “today in the U.S., many families have renewed the tradition of displaying the menorah in windows during the holiday,” I still wondered if “today” was one of those “not safe” times in history. Was it a good time to draw the light safely in and bring the flickering candles into the kitchen? After all, that’s the way my mother, who grew up in the Bronx borough of New York City in the 1930s, when anti-Semitism in America was on the rise, did it in our home. What was I afraid of? It wasn’t as if I’m expecting a replay of the now famous Billings, Montana, incident in 1993, when, according to JTA, “a brick was thrown through the bedroom window of a 5-year-old Jewish boy, Isaac Schnitzer, who was displaying a Hanukkah menorah.” But in an AntiDefamation League report about anti-Semitic incidents issued before the presidential election, California was cited in 2015 as the state with the second-highest level of anti-Semitic incidents. Adding to my sense of Jewish déjà vu, after the election, in mid-November, the ADL’s national director, Jonathan Greenblatt, had announced at the organization’s yearly conference that the American Jewish community had “not seen this level of anti-Semitism in mainstream political and public discourse since the 1930s.” What these statistics challenged, I realized, was not my faith that miraculous things can happen, like a single cruse of oil burning for eight days, but my faith in another kind of miracle — freedom of religion and American pluralism. After national calls to deport Muslims,
Entertaining the Holidays a recent spike in hate crimes in New York—with the majority of incidents directed at Jews—and closer to home, reports last year of a Jewish student at UCLA being harassed because of her identity, I realized that the menorah burning in the window isn’t just a message to fellow Jews—it’s a signal to any person that this was a free and safe place for anyone to openly identify and show his or her beliefs. If I, or anyone, were to light one candle at Hanukkah in full view of neighbors, it wouldn’t be, contrary to the song, not just for the Maccabee children—it would be for all. It doesn’t make any difference which side you were on in the recent election. What must be decided is how with candles, oil or electric bulbs we would vote now. Recalling that my mother’s parents, Joseph and Rebecca, had been strangers here about a century ago, I felt that the welcoming menorah light represented the
freedom for which they had left everything behind. Plus, the act of putting our menorahs in the window would be an opportunity to rekindle the core Jewish belief of welcoming the stranger. To push back the shadows, won’t you join me in a Hanukkah show of light? Help light the way for us, and for others: During the eight nights of Hanukkah, place your menorah where passers-by can see it. Take a photo or selfie, and post it on social media with the hashtag #menorahinthewindow. Share the city, town or place where you are, and let us know why you are doing it. The strength of what we can do as a community—that is a miracle, too. (Be safe with your menorah, light it away from anything that can catch fire and do not leave it unattended.) —Edmon J. Rodman is a JTA columnist who writes on Jewish life from Los Angeles. Contact him at edmojace@gmail.com.
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Happy Chanukah! jewishnewsva.org | December 19, 2016 | Entertaining the Holidays | Jewish News | 21
Join us for our next show. Aaron Sorkin's The Farnsworth Invention January 13 February 5, 2017
Entertaining Give teens the gift of tzedakah this Hanukkah Amy Weinstein
T
idewater Jewish Foundation is debuting a new program for teens, the B’nai Tzedek Teen Philanthropy Program, which will encourage teens to become involved in tzedakah by establishing a fund for Jewish charitable giving. Opening a B’nai Tzedek fund gives a teen the opportunity to play a part in improving the community and the world. So, how does this work? A donation of at least $250 to Tidewater Jewish Foundation will establish a fund in the teen’s name. TJF will match the gift with another $250 for a starting fund balance of $500. Teens can learn about the needs of the Jewish community—locally, in Israel and around the world. Each year, fund holders can grant 5% of their fund to a Jewish charity of their choice. “In essence, the teens are being empowered to take ownership of their own philanthropy—a valuable lesson that we know pays off,” says Scott Kaplan, TJF president and CEO. “Consider giving your teens the gift of a B’nai Tzedek Fund this Hanukkah—the program is open to any Jewish person under the age of 18 in Tidewater. Each year your teen’s fund will receive investment income, and as the fund grows over time, so will the amount of money they can grant to charity,” says Kaplan. “Encourage your teens to share the light of Hanukkah by
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giving back to their community, and set a strong foundation for understanding the importance of tzedakah—your family can make a real difference,” says Kaplan. For information on how to give a teen the gift of philanthropy, or with questions about the B’nai Tzedek Teen Philanthropy Program, contact Amy Weinstein, director of development at 757-965-6105 or aweinstein@ujft.org.
Cut out traditional Hanukkah doughnuts, health minister tells Israelis JERUSALEM (JTA)—Israel’s health minister called on the public to refrain from eating the traditional Hanukkah treat sufganiyot. “I call on the public to avoid eating sufganiyot, which are rich in fats,” Yaakov Litzman of the haredi Orthodox United Torah Judaism party said during a conference to promote healthy eating, Ynet reported. “You can find alternatives for everything nowadays and there is no need for us to fatten our children with sufganiyot, which are not in line with the principles of health and proper nutrition.” Sufganiyot, or traditional jelly doughnuts, are deep fried and covered with powdered sugar, although variations include other fillings and toppings. They are ubiquitous in the weeks leading up to the holiday, with bakeries frying them on the street and selling them fresh to passers-by. “If I had to say this today, I’d say sufganiyot out,” Litzman said. ‘You can eat them, of course, because it is part of the holiday’s customs, but there are alternatives.”
22 | Jewish News | Entertaining the Holidays | December 19, 2016 | jewishnewsva.org
Wishing you a holiday that’s bright with joy, warm with hope, and spent in the company of those you love.
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jewishnewsva.org | December 19, 2016 | Entertaining the Holidays | Jewish News | 23
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