Back in Glasgow, whose Jews number upward of 6,000, Berman grew up playing dreidel, eating potato pancakes and lighting candles for eight days. There were no gifts. Repeat: No gifts.
That’s the refrain from Bay Area Jews who spent their first Chanukahs in far-flung places such as France, Colombia, Cuba, South Africa, Libya and even Israel. Aside from a little gelt, Jews around the world don’t generally include gifts as part of their Chanukah celebrations.
America, it seems, is just about the only country where Jews give eight holiday gifts, or even one.
“No holiday gift exchange,” says Berman in a thick brogue. “I’m a Scottish Jew. We’re so tight we squeak.”
Jokes and gifts aside, Jews from other countries tend to celebrate the holiday in a somewhat uniform fashion, sharing traditions American Jews will recognize: lighting candles, singing songs, eating holiday fare, playing dreidel. Far from the reach of Macy’s and the Home Shopping Club, however, the holiday’s intrinsic themes may be emphasized more deeply.
At least that’s what Nicole Krantz, Michal Joelson, Delvis Fernandez-Levy, Sonia Benjamin, David Kaim and Gina Waldman say.
Nicole Krantz, 28, grew up Orthodox in South Africa and says gifts just weren’t “part of the whole deal. The whole concept is foreign.”
Instead, Chanukah “was about a miracle happening, how the Jews always manage against all odds to come up winning, in the face of destruction and adversity.
“God finds a way to help us out,” says Krantz, who lives in San Francisco and works for the Bureau of Jewish Education.
To Israeli Michal Joelson, Chanukah was “not so much a religious holiday [but] more a story of how the religion was saved by a few really heroic Jews.”
It was also a time to sample an Israeli specialty called sufganiot, a kind of Middle Eastern jelly donut.
Israelis aren’t the only ones who deep-fry to celebrate the Chanukah miracle, though. Cuban-born math teacher Delvis Fernandez-Levy of Hayward recalls borekas, fried phyllo dough pies filled with meat or spinach and traditionally served on the eighth night.
Like Fernandez-Levy and many other Jews from around the world, Joelson’s only Chanukah gift was a bit of gelt from her grandparents.
Now a Sunday-school teacher at Temple Beth Jacob in Redwood City, she says, “I don’t think giving gifts is such a big deal. There’s nothing wrong with it but it’s important to transmit the meaning of Chanukah. That’s something every parent should tell their kid.”
Sonia Benjamin takes a harder line on the American gift-giving culture.
“It’s shocking to give eight gifts,” says Benjamin, editor-in-chief of Le Journal Francais, a national French-language Jewish newspaper based in San Francisco. “Some people don’t have the money or time. Why [give eight gifts]? It’s not proof of love for your child. It’s ridiculous.”
Many foreign-born Jews here attribute Jewish gift-giving to an attempt to keep up with an overcommercialized American Christmas. Benjamin counters by pointing out that while Christmas was “a very big holiday” in France, French Jews never tried to compete by doling out gifts.
It’s a reasonable-sounding argument but not to her 13-year-old son, who gets one gift but wants eight.
“I tell him it’s not the right thing to do. It has no meaning. It’s not tradition or religion, just business,” Benjamin says.
For others, holiday traditions are colored by some mixed memories.
“We never put chanukiot on the window sill or anything,” says David Kaim, who grew up in Colombia and now lives in Oakland. “People didn’t feel comfortable making it public. Colombia is a very Catholic country.”
Still, Kaim’s family lit candles and ate latkes at private family celebrations.
In Libya, Chanukah was even more secretive, remembers Gina Waldman, who moved to the Bay Area from Tripoli in 1969.
“We never owned a menorah; we weren’t allowed to. My grandmother took a tray and just made little candles out of cotton, little balls floating in water and olive oil. We couldn’t be overt about being Jewish,” she says.
Another Libyan ritual was maintained by her grandfather, who would reach his hand into a bag containing spices and an old key. He would turn the key inside the bag while olive oil was poured over his hand.
“The key,” says Waldman, “symbolizes the key to freedom.”
While the Tiburon resident eschews gift-giving as a Jewish adaptation to Western Christianity, she says Chanukah has long been a favorite holiday.
“It’s a celebration of freedom, and that’s especially significant for me, because I was freed from an Arab country.”