Hanukkah giant paper dreidels to celebrate the Festival of Lights and decorate your holiday
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18 December 2016
Dreidel game kit
One 19th-century rabbi maintained that Jews played with the dreidel in
order to fool the Greeks if they were caught studying Torah, which had
been outlawed.
As a matter of fact, the dreidel game originally it has been played by various people in various languages for many centuries.
In England and Ireland there is a game called totum or teetotum that is especially popular at Christmastime. In English, this game is first mentioned as “totum” ca. 1500-1520. The name comes from the Latin “totum,” which means “all.” By 1720, the game was called T- totum or teetotum, and by 1801 the four letters already represented four words in English: T = Take all; H = Half; P = Put down; and N = Nothing.
Our Eastern European game of dreidel (including the letters nun, gimmel, hey, shin) is directly based on the German equivalent of the totum game: N = Nichts = nothing; G = Ganz = all; H = Halb = half; and S = Stell ein = put in. In German, the spinning top was called a “torrel” or “trundl,” and in Yiddish it was called a “dreidel,” a “fargl,” a “varfl” [= something thrown], “shtel ein” [= put in], and “gor, gorin” [= all].
When Hebrew was revived as a spoken language, the dreidel was called, among other names, a sevivon, which is the one that caught on.
HOW TO PLAY DREIDEL ⤵
As a matter of fact, the dreidel game originally it has been played by various people in various languages for many centuries.
In England and Ireland there is a game called totum or teetotum that is especially popular at Christmastime. In English, this game is first mentioned as “totum” ca. 1500-1520. The name comes from the Latin “totum,” which means “all.” By 1720, the game was called T- totum or teetotum, and by 1801 the four letters already represented four words in English: T = Take all; H = Half; P = Put down; and N = Nothing.
Our Eastern European game of dreidel (including the letters nun, gimmel, hey, shin) is directly based on the German equivalent of the totum game: N = Nichts = nothing; G = Ganz = all; H = Halb = half; and S = Stell ein = put in. In German, the spinning top was called a “torrel” or “trundl,” and in Yiddish it was called a “dreidel,” a “fargl,” a “varfl” [= something thrown], “shtel ein” [= put in], and “gor, gorin” [= all].
When Hebrew was revived as a spoken language, the dreidel was called, among other names, a sevivon, which is the one that caught on.
Wooden Dreidels
The dreidel or sevivon is perhaps the most famous custom
associated with Hanukkah. Indeed, various rabbis have tried to find an
integral connection between the dreidel and the Hanukkah story; the standard explanation is that the letters nun, gimmel, hey, shin, which appear on the dreidel in the Diaspora, stand for nes gadol haya sham–“a great miracle happened there,”while in Israel the dreidel says nun, gimmel, hey, pey, which means “a great miracle happened here.”
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