November 28, 2013,
Events, Guru in a Bottle 
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The coincidence this year of Thanksgiving and the start of Hanukkah is very unusual – it last happened in 1888.
But in a way it’s fitting, as American Jews have been embracing Thanksgiving for more than two centuries.
By the time the first of eight candles in Jewish menorah were lit on Wednesday evening for the start of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, the country was largely closed down for Thursday’s Thanksgiving holiday.
According to the most commonly cited calculation, not only has this not happened for 125 years, but it won’t happen again for more than 70,000 years!
That’s because the Jewish calendar is shifting in relation to the Gregorian calendar very, very slowly… at a rate of four days every 1,000 years.
It’s thanks to a quirk of both calendars that 2013 has this curious new amalgam: Thanksgivukkah.
The term was coined and trademarked by marketing guru Dana Gitell, who teamed up with an online Jewish gift shop to sell T-shirts and other memorabilia. Smart move!
Among the items on sale are a “menurkey” – a menorah shaped like a turkey – designed by a nine-year-old New Yorker, whose family say they have sold thousands at $50 a piece.
There’s a Facebook page with more than 13,000 “likes”, a #Thanksgivukkah hashtag on Twitter, and a large number of YouTube music videos of varying quality, but all in the spirit of celebration and friendship!
Historical context
After George Washington proclaimed the first nationwide Thanksgiving celebration in 1789, the preacher at New York’s oldest congregation, Shearith Israel, gave a Thanksgiving sermon and instructed his congregation to observe the holiday.
The service was unprecedented in the history of Jewish liturgy and prayer, comments Allan Nadler, a professor of Jewish studies at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. “The creation of a Hebrew religious service to commemorate a non-Jewish holiday, a holiday whose origins have nothing to do with the Jews – that’s quite remarkable.”
Their immediate adoption of Thanksgiving is also an example of how “Jews in general embraced everything American with real fervour”, adds Prof Nadler.
“The way in which the Jews immigrated to America in the 19th Century – especially the mass wave of Russian Jews at the end of the 19th Century – the speed with they acculturated themselves and rose up economically and intellectually in universities I don’t think has any parallel.”
Historically, Hanukkah was a relatively minor Jewish festival, but it has gained in significance over the last 100 years.
So to all of the Guru in a Bottle community THANKSGIVUKKAH!
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