Shirley Harrow, 53, born in Ramat Gan, has been living in Queens, New York, for 22 years. Since her three daughters were born, she and her husband have been waging a constant struggle to portray the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, which is so often overshadowed by Christmas, as attractive enough to compete. It has not been easy. "There is this scene in 'Friends,'" she says. "Ross is trying to use Hanukkah to teach Jewish values to his son, but he can't compete with Santa Claus. So he dresses up as the Holiday Armadillo to try to make Hanukkah more attractive, but it doesn't work." With a smile, Shirley goes on: "That's the way it is with us, too. On the one hand, it's very hard to avoid the Christmas celebrations, and on the other, we're Jews, and Hanukkah is our holiday. Everything gets mixed together." Shirley's family and other Jews who live abroad have to deal with both holidays falling at the same time in the calendar this year, too, since Christmas Eve falls on the eighth night of Hanukkah. The conflict with their Jewish identity is ongoing. "There is no feeling of Christmas in Israel at all, but here there's a long season of holidays, and it's impossible to avoid it," Shirley says. "It's like in Israel during the [Jewish] holiday season, Rosh Hashana and Sukkot -- everyone feels the holiday atmosphere," she says. "There's shopping, family meals. It's the same here in New York, only much bigger, more colorful and more enticing. The streets are decorated, the stores have special sales, everybody buys presents for each other. The atmosphere is hard to ignore. On the other hand, it's clear that there's Hanukkah, which is also very much a family festival, but there's not much attraction in lighting candles and eating sufganiyot -- doughnuts, which people eat all year round." Shirley says Jews have various ways of dealing with the two holidays. Some ignore Christmas, while others ignore Hanukkah (maybe because they are so far away from Israel). But, she says, "What's very popular here is to celebrate the two holidays together. People light candles, but they also give gifts and decorate a fir tree." This is also what happens when only one parent in the family is Jewish. Candles in Berlin Jews outside the United States also deal with this duplication of holidays. Take Berlin, for example, which in recent months has become a symbol of the blurring of Jewish identity after the protest over the price of Milky pudding snacks. According to estimates, 90 percent of the Jews living in Berlin, which has one of the largest concentrations of Jews in Europe (30,000), celebrate both holidays. There is not much closeness to Jewish tradition in Berlin. The reason is that the Jews who live there have been living there for decades. Either that, or they are Israelis, mostly secular and from the left side of the political spectrum, who were not particularly close to religious observance even before they left Israel. The local rabbi, Shmuel Segal, explains: "The German word for Christmas is Weihnachten. Some people celebrate the two holidays together and call them 'Weihnukka.'" Segal continues: "There was a big uproar two years ago when the Jewish Museum in Berlin mounted a whole exhibition entitled Weihnukka. It was very painful for us. Still, we always look at the glass as being half full -- a formal candlelighting ceremony is going to be held this year at Brandenburg Gate, one of the most central places in Berlin, with a special menorah dozens of meters high. The mayor, the Israeli ambassador in Germany and the German minister of the interior will be in attendance. "So there will be a menorah on one side and a fir tree on the other, at the same height, and the Jews will be in the middle. Here, too, it's possible to see the glass as half full -- we are Jews, such a tiny minority in the world compared to Christians, and yet both these symbols will be standing next to one another equally." Segal adds, "You can't force Jews to celebrate Hanukkah only. That's not our way." Yet again, he points to the half-full glass. "There are many Jews who celebrate Hanukkah and put a fir tree in their homes. But still, we can say up front that Jewish identity is actually getting stronger here in Berlin. More synagogues are being opened, and the trend is a positive one. I am sure that this year, more households will be lighting the Hanukkah candles than bringing home fir trees." The power of tradition Let us return to the United States -- Manhattan, this time -- where Rabbi Uriel Vigler, an emissary of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, has been living with this problem for many years. Rabbi Vigler lives in a large community in Manhattan with his wife and four children. "During this season, in December, there are Christmas lights all over the city," he says. "Everything is lit up and there is a Christmas tree in every home, even in the building where I live. It's impossible not to see it." He continues: "If you are Jewish, you feel like you don't belong, and it's not a pleasant situation. That's why we intensify our activity on Hanukkah. For the first night, all the Chabad houses have come together and rented the whole skating rink in the heart of Manhattan, and we're going to have an event attended by all the Jews in the area. Everyone is invited. It's a popular event, and every year 2,000 people come. We will give people the chance to feel like we have a different option, that we have a beautiful tradition of our own." They even booked the stand-up comic Uri Hizkiya for the event. Still, Rabbi Vigler admits, even in his own family it is not easy to compete with the attraction of Christmas. "We make sure to give presents to the children each night that we light the Hanukkah candles. The children get excited as the holiday approaches. We can't ignore what goes on outside. The children ask about it, but they know that our heritage is the revolt of the Maccabees against the Seleucid Empire, that we have a menorah and that it is a beautiful holiday, so they're not missing out on anything." And just in case you were wondering, Hanukkah also has to fight for its place here in Israel to a certain extent. "With all the children's shows and musicals in the background, the focus of the holiday moves away from its actual content and depth," says Rabbi Yosef Aharonov, the chairman of the Chabad Youth Organization in Israel. "We invest a lot of energy and creativity in showing how attractive Hanukkah is. We mount mobile menorahs on cars, hold exhibitions of menorahs and run ads that make Hanukkah accessible to the Hebrew spoken in Israel in 2014."
