Minor Jewish Holiday Gets Big Play : Celebration: Hanukkah may be a small blip on the Judaic calendar, but the eight-day festival of lights has become high-profile and commercial.

Hanukkah, the eight-day festival of lights that celebrates the survival of Judaism as a minority religion, begins tonight after sundown.

Because they coincide in the calendar, Hanukkah and Christmas are often lumped together. In the United States, both are high-profile commercial holidays that involve gift-giving and bright lights. But according to religious tradition, the two have nothing in common, and many observant Jews find it frustrating that American Jews pay so much attention to what is actually a small blip on the Judaic calendar.

“Unfortunately, because of the December holiday celebration spirit, most people assume that everybody has a Christmas and that the Jewish Christmas is called Hanukkah,” said Rabbi Haim Aba of Temple Beth Tikvah in Fullerton. “For me to say that we have any kind of even slight resemblance between what the Christians celebrate and my Hanukkah--this would be a terrible insult to Christmas. Hanukkah is a very minor holiday in our tradition.”

Jews, however, have contributed to the commercialization of their holiday by insisting that Jewish symbols appear alongside Christmas trees and nativity scenes in public places, exchanging gifts, and, in some cases, even gathering around a Hanukkah bush. None of these have any roots in tradition: in fact, Jewish children are supposed to receive gifts during a little-known holiday called Purim, which comes in the spring.

“Religiously speaking, it’s a very easy holiday to keep,” Stacy Blumberg Garon of the Orange County Jewish Community Center said, noting that Hanukkah does not involve long prayer services or prohibitions against work as do other Jewish festivals.

“You buy a few presents, you light a few pretty candles. It’s very simple,” Garon said. “That’s why a lot of people sort of fall into the practice of Hanukkah more than other holidays.”

Judaism’s most important days are those discussed in the Old Testament.

The High Holy Days--Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement--typically fall in September. Next in religious significance are the three pilgrimage festivals: Sukkot, an eight-day harvest jubilee that marks the 40 years Jews wandered in the desert without permanent homes; Passover, a springtime holiday recalling the exodus from Egypt; and Shavuot, which usually falls in June and celebrates the receiving of the Torah.

Hanukkah, one of about half a dozen other holidays that deal with Jewish history recorded after the Old Testament, celebrates a spiritual struggle dating back to the 2nd Century BC.

It began when Antiochus, an Assyrian Greek king, declared that Jews could no longer practice their religious rituals and traditions. They were offered a choice: convert or die.

Many Jews did convert, but the Hazmonians--commonly known as Judah Maccabee and his brothers--fought for their freedom. The Maccabees managed to win back the holy temple in Jerusalem, which the Assyrians had desecrated in the battle.

As they entered the temple, the Maccabees found a tiny pot of the sacred oil needed for the eternal light, which the Assyrian Greeks (also called Hellenists) had extinguished. Although the oil was only enough to burn for one day, it miraculously lasted eight days--just long enough for some more of the pure substance to be brought from a far-away village.

That is why Hanukkah lasts eight days, with candles lit each night.

“Twenty-two hundred years ago, Hanukkah represented a spiritual struggle against the trappings of a dominant culture. Twenty-two hundred years later, we’re still trapped in the struggle against a material dominant culture,” said Rabbi Mark Miller of Temple Bat Yam in Newport Beach. “If Judah Maccabee came back today, he’d probably shake his head and wonder why he fought (since) many people celebrate his spiritual victory in such a material and secular way.”

Jewish leaders around the county agreed with Miller that education is the key to solving the irony of a commercialized Hanukkah celebration. Children will feel left out if they do not have high-profile Hanukkah celebrations, rabbis and teachers said, but parents should retell the Hanukkah story rather than allowing the December holidays to get confused.

“If our big bang of Hanukkah is just a response to the culture around us and we’ve got to show we also have something, that I’m against,” said Rabbi Moishe Engel of Westminster’s Hebrew Academy. But, Engel added, “the idea of publicizing Hanukkah in a big way I’m for.”

Rabbi Arnold Rachlis, who leads the Reconstructionist University Synagogue in Irvine, said that all Jewish traditions should evolve.

“We’re not going to get Christmas out of the schools and we’re not going to get Christmas out of the malls--what we can do is get Hanukkah in there too,” Rachlis said. “We shouldn’t be purists about keeping Hanukkah minor when it’s a Jewish human need to make it more.”