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Chanukkah

The Story of Chanukkah

Chanukkah Recipes

Chanukkah Movies

The story of Chanukkah

About two-thousand years ago our ancestors were living under the oppression of the Hellenistic king Antiochus IV of Syria. Antiochus IV wanted them to assimilate into the Greek culture and therefore he prohibited us to celebrate the Shabbat and the Mo'adim, study the Torah, and all of our other religious duty's to G-d. Antiochus IV even went as far as desacrating G-d's Holy Temple, by sacrificing a pig to the Greek idol Zeus on our G-d's holy altar!

In the village of Modi'in lived an old priest, Mattityahu, with his five sons. They led the Jewish people in a revolt against the Syrian king and his soldiers. Yehuda, one of the sons of Mattityahu, became the leader of the courageous Jewish rebels. They were called the Maccabees, probably after Yehuda's nickname HaMaccabee (hammer).

In the month of Kislev the Maccabees, with the help of G-d, succeeded in driving the Syrians out and recapturing the Holy Temple. Now they needed to clean out the Temple, and restoring it to the worship of HaShem. They made a new altar and carried out some extensive repairs to the Temple. Then we can read in I Maccabees 4:

And they arose early on the twenty-fifth day of the ninth month, that is Kislev, in the one hundred and forty-eighth year, and offered sacrifice according to the Torah upon the new altar. (...)
And they celebrated the rededication of the altar for eight days.

Tradition holds that when the Maccabees wanted to light the Menorah again, they found only enough kosher oil, in a sealed jar, for the Menorah to burn one day. They decided to light the Menorah nevertheless. Miraculously the oil lasted for eight days. Exactly long enough to prepare new oil.

We celebrate Chanukkah, the re dedication of the altar, for eight days, starting on the 25th of the Jewish month Kislev (usually somewhere in December). For eight days we light the Chanukkiyah, sing Chanukkah-songs, play the dreidel and eat latkes. The children also get a present on each night of this festival.

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© Leah, True2Torah, 2002-2008, all rights reserved.