Avi Ben Hayun doesn’t mind Christmas lights. He isn’t impatient with the Christmas music that can feel oppressive to American Jews. And he doesn’t lose sleep about his children’s exposure to Christmas culture.
Mostly, the 42-year old Israeli who has been in Milwaukee for a year-and-a-half sees Christmas as a foreign holiday to which he has no connection.
“It’s one of the important holidays for the others — I appreciate it,” said Ben Hayun, who is technical vice president of HomeFree Systems. “It doesn’t bother me because it’s the same as we celebrate Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur and all the Jewish holidays.”
And he’s happy to enjoy the beauty of the lights, which he called “amazing” and “gorgeous.”
As for the challenge posed by exposing his four children to the excitement of the decorations and presents, this Israeli father is undaunted. When his 12-year-old daughter asked, “Why are we not doing that?” he simply explained that Jewish people are not connected to it.
“It’s not in our culture and not in our Jewish holidays.” She accepted that but asked to “put all the lights in Chanukah.
“It’s OK with me to celebrate Chanukah with different lights, but not to celebrate [foreign] holidays.”
Ben Hayun’s is a distinctly Israeli attitude, one less affected by the fear of assimilation that shapes many American Jews’ perspectives. Confident that his children have a solidly Jewish Israeli identity, Ben Hayun is able to appreciate Christmas from the side.
Israelis also have a different view of the relationship between Chanukah and Christmas, said Rakefet Ginsberg, shlichah (Israel emissary) and director of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Israel Center.
“As an Israeli, I don’t feel threatened by Christmas, so I don’t need to adopt anything that seems like Christmas. But the Jewish identity of American Jews is threatened in a lot of ways,” Ginsberg said.
Because Christmas is a dominant experience in American culture, many American Jews feel that to compete with it, they have to have Chanukah customs that look similar to Christmas but are made Jewish, like Chanukah cookies and Chanukah presents, Ginsberg said.
In Israel, Chanukah is usually marked as a minor historical holiday — without lights, cookies and gifts.
For Rachel Macagon, who has lived in Milwaukee for 22 years and raised four sons here, Christmas has never posed a problem. Rather, she feels fortunate to have had the opportunity to explore another culture here in the U.S.
In a recent telephone interview, she said her boys, who range from 9- to 23-years-old have grown up in a strong Jewish family and received good Jewish educations.
They have enjoyed sharing their traditions with their many non-Jewish friends. “We never kept the kids away [from Christmas]; we were invited and we invited non-Jewish people too,” she said.
Macagon herself waits for Christmas, she said and when “Chanukah and Christmas come together, that’s my best time. I love it.”
Working with many non-Jews at Gan Ami Beginnings, Preschool and Kindergarten at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center, where she teaches 3-year-olds, Macagon said, for her, every year it’s an experience sharing holidays. She wants her friends to explore Chanukah and they let her explore Christmas.
“I enjoy it. There is just one God and let everyone be happy. Why not? It’s a holiday.”
Maya Levanon, 36, who is expecting her first child in February, sees both the positive and the negative side of the Christmas season.
A professor at National Louis University teaching philosophy of education and interdisciplinary education, Levanon has been in Milwaukee for one year. But she lived in the New York/New Jersey area for six years before coming here.
Levanon likes the build-up to Christmas, she said. “The winter is so horrible,” and the beauty and excitement of the Christmas season are contagious.
The accompanying break from work is also appreciated. “At least it gives one month a more positive light,” Levanon said.
The downside, however, arrives with the actual holiday. On Christmas eve and Christmas day Levanon said. “I feel like I’ve been left out of the party. It’s feeling like everyone has something to do, like family and stuff and I’m like ‘Why am I here?’ [Christmas] doesn’t concern me.”
Maya Oren-Dahan has lived in Brookfield for five years with her husband, Ophir, who works for G.E. Medical, and their three children, 10, 7 and 2 months.
With young children attending public schools, Christmas poses a challenge. “It’s difficult to compete,” Oren-Dahan said.
The fact that they are not a religious family, makes it harder, but they “try to make a big deal of Chanukah,” she said. Even though they gave just one present to their children when they lived in Israel, now they give eight.
Oren-Dahan was born and raised in the former Soviet Union until 1990. Then, at 18, she made aliyah. In the FSU, where religion was forbidden, her family had a tree, which they called a New Year’s tree, she said.
Oren-Dahan is pleased that one of her daughters’ music teacher planned for her class to sing Chanukah songs one day last week. That teacher asked her daughter to bring a CD of Chanukah songs, “even if they’re in Hebrew.” The daughter was very excited, she said. “My kids are almost the only Jewish kids in school and it bothers them that they are the only ones that celebrate Chanukah,” Oren-Dahan said.
Once, when the family was in New York in December, they were surprised to see so many Chanukah symbols along with Christmas symbols. “I would love to see it here, but I understand we are a very small minority.”
Razia Azen has a stronger reaction to the holiday. She arrived in the U.S. at age 12 with her parents. Now a professor of research methods and statistics in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, she has been in the U.S. for 27 years.
It bothers her that “everyone assumes that everyone [is celebrating Christmas] and is in a festive mood.”
“I don’t feel any kind of connection to it. I didn’t grow up feeling that this time of the year is particularly festive, so it doesn’t do anything for me.”
Azen thinks Jews who grew up here “do feel like it’s holiday time, it’s a little bit festive. I think also that they grew up with a Chanukah that is a little bit more tied to Christmas. You know, giving gifts and having parties” which Israelis don’t do.
Azen doesn’t have children but she said she has a colleague from China who shares the December dilemma. “They don’t quite know what to do because their 10-year-old is asked at school, ‘What did you get for Christmas?’”
Yaffa Areiff, who described herself as “very Orthodox,” in a telephone interview from Israel, where she was visiting last week, has never had any problems with her children being attracted to Christmas.
Married to an American and living in the Milwaukee area for almost 30 years, Arieff said that Christmas doesn’t affect her or her children, now 28, 25 and 18.
“I think we were so Jewish, more even than Israeli. They never asked me for gifts even though, by the way, we don’t do Chanukah things either.”
Arieff said, “We played dreidel just for the fun of it, but we don’t give gifts. My kids were never attracted to Christmas, even though they went to public school. They never even asked for it. I didn’t have to struggle with them. It’s a goyim thing.”
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