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Daily Briefing :CELEBRATING CHANUKAH: THE VICTORY OF THE WEAK OVER THE STRONG (December 11,2020)

Our Worst Year Ends in a Hanukkah Miracle David Suissa, Algemeiner, Dec. 10, 2020 The COVID-19 vaccine is on its way. Instead of waiting years and years, as we normally do with vaccines, we waited eight months. Can you believe it? It’s a modern twist on the ancient Hanukkah miracle when oil for one night lasted for eight. Here, scientists burned the midnight oil for eight long months to bring us a vaccine that will rescue a suffering world.
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A contemporary Candelabrum (Menorah, Hebrew: מנורה) in the style of a traditional Menorah. Seen here with eight candles lit (the ninth candle is the service, Shamash, Hebrew: שמש), used during the Jewish Hanukkah holiday, 2014, United Kingdom. Photo by Gil Dekel. (Wikipedia)

Table of Contents:

The True Meaning of Hanukkah:  David Harsanyi, National Review, Dec. 9, 2020

In Memory of Judah Maccabee:  Allan Arkush, Jewish Review of Books,Dec. 4, 2018

From Partisan to Maccabee:  Rokhl Kafrissen, Tablet, Dec. 10, 2020

How Hanukkah Returned to Amsterdam’s Royal Concert Hall Decades after the Holocaust:  Cnaan Liphshiz, JTA, Dec. 3, 2020

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The True Meaning of Hanukkah
David Harsanyi
National Review, Dec. 9, 2020In a recent Parents magazine piece headlined, “How to Explain the Hanukkah Story to Kids,” we are informed that, “this year more than any other is a great opportunity to take extra time to teach your family about the Jewish holiday that celebrates the power of light and miracles.” Hanukkah, Parents goes on to explain, “means dedication in Hebrew, and the Jewish holiday, also known as The Festival of Lights, represents joy.”Joy? This kind of insufferably vacuous, anesthetized, consumerist celebration that American Jews have concocted to compete with Christmas is stripped of any genuine theological or cultural meaning.It’s a shame, because from a historical and cultural perspective, Hanukkah might be Judaism’s most fascinating holiday; a story about roiling political upheavals of the ancient world, nationalism, assimilation, civil war, religious zealotry, martyrdom, and corruption.In short, the first two books of the Maccabees detail a revolt led by the patriarch Mattathias and his five sons against the Hellenistic king Antiochus, who had barred Jewish religious practice, desecrated the Holy Temple, levied high taxes, and forced the population to adopt Greek rituals and norms.The first book is written from the perspective of those in the countryside, where the Maccabees conducted a guerrilla war against the Greeks, while taking ample time to slaughter Hellenized Jews along the way. Nowhere in this blood-soaked tale is there any mention of oil or the “power of light or miracles,” and there is definitely very little on the topic of joy.

It is true that Hanukkah “means dedication in Hebrew” — a dedication that predates any mention of a miracle of light. It is a dedication to the installation of the Hasmonean Dynasty by the Maccabees after they finally subdued all of the Seleucids’ Jewish allies, taking control of the priesthood, Jerusalem, and the future of Israel.

The tale of the Maccabees taking back the Holy Temple and finding only one day’s worth of blessed oil that miraculously lasts eight days was added hundreds of years later in the Talmud. I am no religious scholar, but it very much feels like an afterthought meant to soften the tale and inject some theology. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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In Memory of Judah Maccabee
Allan Arkush
Jewish Review of Books, Dec. 4, 2018

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the father of modern Hebrew, spent the first days of the Hanukkah of 1893 in jail. The Turkish authorities in Jerusalem had imprisoned him on account of an article that appeared in his newspaper, Ha-tzvi, ten days before the holiday.

Composed by his father-in-law, Shlomo Naftali Hertz Jonas, who was also put in jail, this short piece bore the seemingly pious title of “Mitzvot tzrikhot kavana” (commandments require intention). To some it must have looked like a comment on the longstanding and well-known rabbinic debate about whether this was indeed the case. But it was something else altogether.

Jonas’s complaint was that the Jews who performed the commandment of lighting the Hanukkah candles and inserted a special holiday prayer into the daily Amidah paid no attention to the true significance of their actions. They effusively thanked God for fighting on their behalf against the ancient oppressors who sought to uproot their religion. “But who was God’s emissary? Who was the warrior?” Judah Maccabee, of course. Yet it was as if he never existed. The prayer doesn’t mention him at all! We pay no attention to this great hero, Jonas lamented, from whom we could learn a great deal about the love of our land and the love of our people—the man from whom we could learn how “to defend ourselves, to gather strength, and to go forward.”

This stirring praise of an ancient Jewish hero wouldn’t have had any major repercussions had not Ben-Yehuda’s inveterate enemies, the leaders of the ultra-Orthodox communities in Jerusalem, distanced themselves from it loudly and publicly. “We and the rest of the Jews living securely under the rule of our lord and king, the Sultan, may he be exalted, are loyal subjects of our king and wash our hands of this strange article as well as everything else published in Ha-tzvi.” Worse accusations of disloyalty were no doubt made in private, leading the Turkish authorities to incarcerate both of the dangerous subversives, the writer and his editor. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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From Partisan to Maccabee
Rokhl Kafrissen
Tablet, Dec. 10, 2020

How does a child partisan become a Maccabee? It takes a small-scale act of national imagination. And like the Hanukkah (or Khanike, in Yiddish) narrative, it’s a complicated story of military conflict, straining at the boundaries of what we think of as children’s literature.

In the period immediately after WWII, the small number of Jewish child survivors in Poland became the subject of intense interest to Jewish community leaders. Thousands of these children ended up in a network of children’s homes and other institutions for child survivors. There was intense competition between Zionist homes, which prepared them for immigration to Palestine, and those that believed there was still a future for Jews in communist Poland.

The devastation of the war meant that these children were, quite literally, the future. The lives of child survivors consequently became an important topic in the Jewish community. Child survivors were depicted as tough, resourceful, and psychologically resilient enough to work through the horrors of yesterday and become the leaders of tomorrow.

The 1948 Yiddish movie Undzere Kinder (Our Children) is a good example of the discourse around child survivors. It was co-written by Rokhl Oyerbakh, a pioneer in collecting survivor testimony, and filmed in Poland in 1946-47. Undzere Kinder was shot in a semi-verité style using real child survivors. Its visual style reads at times as downright Hitchcockian and its imagery, whether intentional or not, veers toward the Freudian. By night, two visitors creep about a home for Jewish child survivors. Unseen, they observe the intimate conversations of the residents of the home, adults as well as children, as they reveal the dark stories that cannot be spoken in the daylight.

In contrast, Menashe Unger’s Yiddish short story “Der kleyner makabi”(1950) also deals with child survivors, but its scenes are alive with color, and the story reads something like a modern-day fable. Despite its ripped-from-the-headlines characters and plot, the story makes explicit its appeal to Jewish mythology.

Dovidl is a 13-year-old Warsaw Ghetto escapee who spent two years living in the forest with a partisan unit. Though he’s now happily established at a kibbutz near Tel Aviv, his sense of self is fractured. In just a few pages, “Der kleyner makabi” employs transhistorical dreamwork, the dramatic stage, as well as the field of combat, to completely shatter Dovidl’s psyche and put him back together as a Zionist whole.
 
The story appears in Unger’s collection of stories and plays for children called Gut Yom-Tov Kinder (Happy Holidays, Children). Though it was written and published in the United States, Unger was a Poyle Tsiyen (Labor Zionist) activist, and he played a role in the now forgotten chapter of Yiddish language postwar Zionism.

“Der kleyner makabi” takes place at a kibbutz at Hanukkah time. Hanukkah, a once minor festival, was rehabilitated by the Zionist movement to serve as a narrative of national liberation of the land. Zionists shifted the focus of the Hasmonean story from the physical redemption of the Temple to the human triumph of the Maccabees, encouraging those settling in Palestine to think of themselves as Maccabees, too. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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How Hanukkah Returned to Amsterdam’s Royal Concert Hall Decades After the Holocaust
Cnaan Liphshiz
JTA, Dec. 3, 2020

There’s a huge pipe organ where the Torah ark should be, but otherwise this city’s Royal Concert Hall looks, sounds and feels like a synagogue for one night each year. That’s because since 2015, this 132-year-old establishment, one of the world’s most prestigious music venues, has hosted an annual cantorial Hanukkah concert. A tradition that had been paused for 70 years after the Holocaust, its resumption is helping to unite and revitalize a dwindling and divided community with its glorious past.

The program ranges from traditional numbers like “Maoz Tzur,” a 13th-century poem, to “Al Kol Eleh,” an Israeli hit from 1980. The predominantly Jewish audience sings and claps along — a major faux pas at almost any other concert here — as those unaccustomed to singing in Hebrew struggle to pronounce the words correctly in an evident attempt to connect with their roots. “Putting Holocaust commemorations aside, it’s one of the few moments when you have people from all Jewish denominations, from the most liberal to the most Orthodox, in one place for a Jewish event,” said Rabbi Yanki Jacobs, director of the Amsterdam chapter of the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement.

Besides the organ, the only other obvious giveaway that the dual-leveled venue is not a synagogue is the presence of prominent plaques affixed on the galleries bearing the names of famous composers — including one for the notoriously anti-Semitic Richard Wagner.

The event’s highlight is a religious element in which Hanukkah candles are lit on a menorah that is an important symbol for this community: a 122-year-old silver artifact that was hid from the Nazis and is an exact replica of the priciest Hanukkah menorah in the world, Amsterdam’s 267-year-old Rintel Menorah.
The concert was a tradition before World War II, when the Nazis put an end to it and went on to murder at least 75% of Dutch Jewry in the Holocaust.

Since then, the Dutch Jewish community has failed to replenish its pre-Holocaust numbers — there are slightly fewer Jews living in the Netherlands today as there were in 1946, according to a demographics study from this year.

Leaders of the community of about 30,000 have raised questions in recent years about its future viability amid rising anti-Semitism and a culture of assimilation. About half of Dutch-Jewish parents don’t circumcise their children, for example, according to a survey from 2009. Less than 25% are members of a synagogue, and most Jews marry non-Jews.

With that mind Barry Mehler, the expatriate New Yorker who led the return of the Royal Concert Hall Hanukkah concert, said he designed the event to fit the broadest range of Jews possible. Mehler, 55, who came to Amsterdam in 1989 because it was “mecca for gay people,” as he puts it, hosts the concert with a mix of humor and musical virtuosity that transcends the growing polarization here among the religious denominations. At the 2017 event, he asked the audience to note the shtreimel — a large hat made of sable fur common in certain haredi Orthodox communities — on the head of the cantor who was singing on stage. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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FOR FURTHER REFERENCE:

Hanukkah on the Beach:  Nomi Kaltmann, Tablet, Dec. 8, 2020 — When 99-year-old Holocaust survivor Ella Blumenthal celebrates Hanukkah, it’s very different than it was when she was growing up in Poland.

Chanukah Guide for the Perplexed 2020:  Yoram Ettinger, The Ettinger Report, Dec. 8, 2020 — Historical context.  Chanukah, the holiday of light, is narrated in the four ‘Books of the Maccabees,’ ‘The Scroll of Antiochus’ and ‘The Wars of the Jews.’

Archaeological Evidence of Chanukah Story:  Jackie Headapohl, The Jewish News, Dec. 4, 2018  Shortly after the 1967 Six Day War, Theo and Miriam Siebenberg purchased a new home on a hill in the newly liberated Old City. Eventually, the site also became home to the Siebenberg House, a remarkable museum of Jewish history.

Podcast: Ambassador Ron Dermer Looks Back on His Years in Washington:  Tikvah Podcast at Mosaic, Dec. 10, 2020 — From the Iran nuclear deal to the rise of and fall of Islamic State, from Israel’s year of inconclusive elections to a pandemic that has ravaged the globe, the second decade of the 21st century has been historic for both the United States and Israel.
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This week’s Communiqué Isranet is: Communiqué: Course contre la montre pour stopper le programme nucléaire des mollahs

CIJR wishes our friends and supporters Shabbat Shalom and a Chag Chanukah Sameach!

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