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Hanukkah: Some Jewish Leaders See Darker Side to the Festival of Lights

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Complaints of commercialization of the holidays apparently are not limited to Christmas. A Solana Beach rabbi, frustrated with journalists calling his synagogue about Hanukkah, wailed at the fifth reporter who telephoned, saying, “Call back when the real important Jewish holidays come.”

Hanukkah is of minor importance in the Jewish calendar relative to the High Holy Days of Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah, the Day of Atonement and Jewish New Year.

“I just wish that people would call in relation to the major holidays,” Rabbi Wayne Dosick of the Congregation Beth Am said. The festival begins this evening with the lighting of the first of eight candles of the Hanukkah menorah, or candelabra. One candle is added each evening through next Friday.

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“Hanukkah in the Jewish calendar is really a very minor festival,” Dosick said. “It has been celebrated as a minor festival throughout the Jewish generations. Only in the last hundred years or so has Hanukkah taken on this larger-than-life religious significance because it coincides with Christmas.”

Dosick, who leads the Conservative congregation and teaches courses in the Jewish faith at the University of San Diego, said the holiday has been commercialized in much the same way Christmas has, with the exchanging of gifts and celebrations, and it has done so “probably in response to the way Christmas has been commercialized.”

“This has been part of our sojourn here in America. We live in a Christian society, and each December our kids are bombarded by the glitz and glimmer and tinsel,” Dosick said. “We have, in essence, responded to our kids’ watching their friends and neighbors getting gifts and decorating their houses and all these exciting things.”

The commercialization has upset more than a few Jewish leaders.

“Some people feel that the very essence of Hanukkah is the rejection of the idea that Jews need to give up Jewish ways and acculturate to the majority religion,” said Rabbi Martin Levin of the Congregation Beth El in La Jolla. In the story of Hanukkah, Jews refused to assimilate into the ruling Greek culture and insisted that they be allowed to retain the Jewish way of life.

“But some modern scholars claim that many traditions that we think of as Jewish, such as the dreidel, themselves originated from adopting the majority culture,” said Levin.

“The argument would be that Judaism has always absorbed traditions and even values from the majority culture that were in accordance with Judaism’s essential messages, and the idea of giving gifts, the focus around children, and decorating a home to highlight a festival are things that by themselves do not contradict Judaism, and are things that are welcomed in Judaism,” Levin said.

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Leonard Rosenthal, associate rabbi of the Conservative Tifereth Israel Synagogue in San Carlos, said the commercialization of Hanukkah, although disappointing, is not a significant issue among Jews.

“More of a concern for us is that Jews will remember our other holidays with equal celebration and equal importance,” said Rosenthal. “Since it’s not a major holiday, I’m not as concerned that the message of the holiday will be lost in the commercialization.”

The story of Hanukkah began 2,100 years ago when the Greeks controlled Syria. The Greeks had followed a policy of religious tolerance until Antiochus IV came to power. Antiochus drove the Jews out of their own temple in Jerusalem and had a statue of a Greek god put there in its place.

A small Jewish family called the Maccabees led a ragtag rebellion against the Greeks, eventually evicting them from the country in 165 B.C.

After their victory, they rededicated the Jerusalem temple, but only one day’s supply of oil remained in the Eternal Light, and it would take eight days for a sanctified oil to be produced. The light, however, continued to burn over the eight days.

The miracle of the oil lamp, however, has been challenged by modern scholars who believe that rabbis 150 years after the Jews’ victory made up the story, Levin said. The ruling dynasty that followed the overthrow of the Greeks eventually became cruel, and the rabbis wanted to divert attention from that part of their history by fabricating the story of the oil lamp, the scholars say.

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