Many have asked, “Why do we eat jelly donuts on Chanukah?” To answer that question, first of all, they taste good, and now we have an excuse, since jelly donuts are fried in oil, and there is a tradition to eat oily foods on Chanukah. This tradition developed because of the miracle of the one pure jar of oil found in the Temple that was able to last for eight days, although the amount should have been enough for only one day.
Another lesser known fact is that, found alongside the oil, odd as it may seem, was enough flour, yeast, sugar, and jam to make a batch of donuts. Even more astonishingly, they all had a Badatz hechsher. This alone, however, does not fully account for jelly donuts becoming traditional Chanukah fare.
According to one opinion, there is a deeper philosophical reason for the eating of jelly donuts. As we know, the Greeks were really into sports. As a matter of fact, all those sport-type words that we use come from Greek: athlete, marathon, pentathlon, shlepathlon (special race for the nice guys who always finished last), and Nike – they are all Greek. The Greeks worshipped the body and were big into health, with the goal of achieving the “perfect” human athletic form. So if you offered a Greek a jelly donut, he would look at you as if you had offered him poison (to which it is probably equivalent, on a certain level).
“Jelly donuts!” they would exclaim, “no way Josephus!” (When Greeks got excited, they were apt to babble in Latin.) It therefore became customary to eat jelly donuts in front of the Greeks as a sign of rebellion. The anti-Hellenists would chew on a donut, rub their tummies, and sigh “yummm,” just for spite. It became the Jewish thing to do, and, if not quite achieving the status of a mitzva, it became at least a very strong minhag (custom). And the Greeks would look on, drooling and wondering to themselves, “How many marathons would I need to run to work off one jelly donut?” (This was before the invention of custard, marshmallow and other amazing fillings, so the number of marathons needed may have changed.)
Naturally, these days we can’t go around eating jelly donuts all year round. As a matter of fact, one of the miracles of Chanukah was not only that the Maccabees were able to defeat the Greeks, but that they were able to wage war at all after all those jelly donuts! But, as we know, they were on the level to merit such miracles. Today, if we ate jelly donuts on a regular basis, most of us would not only be prevented from running a marathon or even jogging (let’s face it, how many of us can do this even without the donuts?), we’d have trouble just crossing the street! Nevertheless, on Chanukah we eat jelly donuts to remember the successful rebellion, and we, too, miraculously survive.
There is also an opinion that we eat jelly donuts because, in the frying of the donuts, one uses the amount of oil that would normally be enough for a person for eight days. There are those who dispute this, saying it is the amount that would last for eight weeks. But some say this includes the oil used for potato latkes, which are beyond the scope of this article.
So far we have only mentioned the donut aspect, not even touching on the jelly. It is a little known “fact” that the original jelly donuts were made with blueberry jam. The powdered sugar on top is white. Blue and white – does this remind you of something? Of course it does: the Penn State football team. But wait! They are also the colors of the Israeli flag! Few people today realize that the Israeli flag was modeled on the colors of the blueberry jelly donut, a traditional Jewish symbol, otherwise known as the “Magen Shemen” (Shield of Oil). For reasons unknown, the Magen David (commonly referred to as the Jewish star) has replaced this symbol in popularity, particularly for jewelry items. You almost never see anyone wearing a Magen Shemen necklace these days.
In any case, it’s good to keep in mind that no matter what type of jelly donut you bite into, it was the original blue and white symbol. (There are those who say that when Mashiach arrives, all jelly donuts will once again be made from blueberries, which will be very plentiful in the land.)
Of course, all of the above relies on a minor opinion of the various “facts” – a very minor opinion. Please let me know if you happen to hold these opinions too, in which case, perhaps I’ll be able to upgrade this to “a somewhat minor” opinion. But there are other, more commonly accepted, views on record for how this custom became popular and we will now examine these.
Actually, according to Gil Marks, in his book The Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, the first written record we have of jelly donuts is found in a cookbook, Kuchenmeisterei (Mastery of the Kitchen), published in Germany in 1485. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the Maccabees weren’t the first to create the donuts; it could be the recipes were just passed down orally. Marks, himself, states that it is unknown whether the cookbook author invented these items or was simply recording a recipe. In any case, these donuts were called “gefüllte krapfen” in German (perhaps sounding somewhat less than appetizing to the English speaking person). One source I saw says that the word kreplach is derived from this word, and the French, crepe, quite possibly is related. The gefüllte krapfen were deep-fried in lard, making them ineligible for most hechsherim.
This cookbook was later translated into Polish, and the popularity of jelly donuts spread all across Europe, where they were known under different names. The Polish Jews fried them in shmaltz or oil and called them ponchiks, and in some areas of Poland, it became customary to eat them during Chanukah. If you look online, you can actually find the word ponchiks used for jelly donuts in the U.S. in some areas.
Marks writes, “Polish immigrants brought ponchiks to Israel, along with the custom of eating them on Chanukah. In Israel, however, ponchiks soon took the name sufganiyah (sufganiyot, plural), from a “spongy dough” mentioned in the Talmud, sofgan and sfogga. The word sphog, meaning sponge, is so ancient that there is a question as to whether it was initially of Semitic or Indo-European origin.”
Furthermore, according to Marks, in the 1920s the Histadrut labor union encouraged the use of sufganiyot as a Chanukah minhag in order to provide better employment opportunities to their workers. Since making jelly donuts are harder to make at home than latkes, the Histadrut made a push to create a market for a commercial, store-bought product, which would be easier on the home baker and more profitable for the workers.
Gil Marks relates another interesting anecdote, with his punch line inserted, explaining why jelly donuts were called “Berliners” in Germany by the early 1800s. “In 1756, a patriotic baker from Berlin was turned down as unfit for Prussian military service but allowed to remain as a field baker for the regiment. Because armies in the field had no access to ovens, he began frying doughnuts over an open fire, which the soldiers began calling Berliners, after the baker’s home. The term soon became narrowed to denote only filled krapfen. Thus, technically, John F. Kennedy’s famous declaration at the Berlin Wall, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner,’ means ‘I am a jelly doughnut.’”
I’m sure these are just some of the reasons why we eat jelly donuts on Chanukah. There are other, more esoteric, kabbalistic explanations, but I wanted to keep this simple and on a level that the layman (myself included) could understand.
Have a happy Chanukah!
Source for the information by Gil Marks can be found on this website: http://leitesculinaria.com/60405/writings-histotry-of-sufganiyah.html. On a more serious note, please daven for a refuah shelaimah for Mr. Marks, Yitzchak Simcha ben Beila, who has been battling a serious illness.
