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Chanukah may last eight days for most
photos: Shimon Gifter
Jews, but at the Safran residence in Boro
Park, visitors can enjoy a year-round
celebration of the holiday’s motif: dreidels
of every color, size, medium, and design
adorn virtually every inch of space. In
honor of Chanukah, the Safrans opened
their home to Mishpacha, allowing
readers a peek at their unique collection
“Oh dreidel, dreidel, dreidel…”
Rabbi Safran displays his
Peruvian masterpiece, custom
carved with a penknife
Dreidels
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22 Kislev 5770 12.9.09
Unl imited
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Barbara Bensoussan
T
he house, on a quiet Boro Park street, does not particularly
arrest one’s view: it is not especially large, and it has a
discreet facade of gray stucco. Only the stylish railings of
curled forged iron and the delicately painted ceramic name plaque
hint that the occupants might possibly possess an artistic eye.
Yet once the front door is opened, the accidental tourist
finds himself entering a jewel box of a dwelling, one whose
compartments, in walls and shelves and mounted cases, contain
baubles of a very unusual kind: dreidels and more dreidels,
dreidels of every conceivable size and shape and material, dreidels
from all over the world! These stunning displays, meticulously
and artfully arranged, render the house a veritable mini-museum
of dreidels.
The “curators” of this charming collection of over a thousand
dreidels are Rabbi Eliyahu and Clary Safran, the home’s
enthusiastic occupants. On the surface, these two do not look
terribly similar: he appears scholarly and distinguished, with a
white beard and astute blue eyes; she is brunette and vivacious, a
bren with Eastern European features and the Hungarian accent to
match. They complement each other beautifully, however, and in
addition to sharing their lives, they now share a passion and project
together: growing their large and varied collection of dreidels.
The collection is set up in the two front rooms comprising
Rabbi Safran’s study and library. One passes through a lavendercolored entry, with shelf-lined arches on either side, to rooms
furnished with European elegance. The cream-and-beigestriped walls, powder-blue rugs, and antiqued blue finish of the
bookcases even suggest a Chanukah color scheme. In addition to
the dreidels, there are numerous menorahs on display, as well as
framed lithographs of dreidels; and even a collage, assembled by
Rabbi Safran himself, of envelopes and stamps bearing first-dayof-issue American stamps with images of dreidels and menorahs.
Even the night light in the hallway is in the shape of a dreidel!
My inner psychologist compels me to ask: what leads an
otherwise “ordinary” Jewish couple (although the longer I work
for Mishpacha, the more I am convinced that no Jew is merely
“ordinary”) to develop a consuming obsession with a child’s
holiday plaything? The answer, they tell me, is a combination of
the spiritual and the sentimental.
This whimsical dreidel is reminiscent of Noah’s Ark
“The French philosopher
Pascal was asked by King
Louis XIV to prove the
existence of miracles. And
Ornate embellishments lend this dreidel a uniquely
elegant look
what did he answer? ‘Why,
the Jews, your Majesty,’
he said, ‘The Jews’
Many of the Safrans’ dreidels play Chanukah music. This
elaborate musical dreidel features a dreidel inside a glass
bell. The base, composed of a circle of children holding
hands, turns as it plays “I Have a Little Dreidel”
This dreidel, made by a Virginia couple named
Melanie and Harry Dankowicz, features an intricate
paper cut design of dancing children and vines
Miracles All the Time “What is written on a dreidel?”
Rabbi Safran asks rhetorically. “Neis gadol hayah sham,” a great
miracle happened there (or here, as many Israeli dreidels proclaim).
Chanukah is a story of miracles.
“Yet we are surrounded by miracles every single day. Three
times a day, we thank Hashem ‘al nissecha shebechol yom imanu,’
for the miracles that are always around us. We open our eyes in
the morning — it’s a miracle. We stand up and walk — another
miracle. The dreidels remind me constantly of all the miracles we
have to be grateful for.”
Rabbi Safran, who currently serves as senior rabbinic
coordinator and vice president of communications and marketing
for the Orthodox Union’s kashruth division, and who previously
held rabbinic positions in Pittsburgh and New Jersey, adds
a historical perspective: “Am Yisrael only exists because of
miracles,” he says. “The French philosopher Pascal was asked by
King Louis XIV to prove the existence of miracles. And what did
he answer? ‘Why, the Jews, your Majesty,’ he said, ‘The Jews.’
Even Arnold Toynbee, who wrote a ten-volume encyclopedia of
human history in which he formulated ‘laws’ of history, was forced
to admit that the Jews were a glaring exception to every law he’d
proposed.”
So the Jew as part of a people is miraculous, but each individual
Jew is often zocheh to see miracles on an individual level as well.
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22 Kislev 5770 12.9.09
For Rabbi and Mrs. Safran, that miracle came in the form of a fresh
start, a second chance to establish a bayis ne’eman b’Yisrael.
Sentimental Journey “We met on the second night of
This creative twist on the traditional features buildings
of Jerusalem stone atop the traditional dreidel shape
Chanukah,” Clary Safran says, beaming. “For us, Chanukah means
the beginning of becoming a couple.” They have now been married
eight years, and have been collecting dreidels about as long. A few
of the dreidels, I notice, feature tiny painted images of chassanim
and kallos, obviously in commemoration.
Both Clary and her husband had been married before. They
had each been on their own for many years, and had almost given
up on the idea of remarrying. Once the couple met, though, it soon
became clear that they went together as perfectly as, well, latkes
and applesauce. Clary points to the floor to show me, with obvious
delight, incontrovertible evidence that the two of them were on
the same wavelength well before they met: the pair of apparently
matching floral Belgian rugs, in shades of blue and rose and cream,
were actually not bought as a pair. Instead, both Clary and her
husband had independently purchased almost exactly the same rug
before they ever met!
The marriage allowed Clary to fulfill yet another of her
dreams: having exactly nine children. “My husband has four, and
I have five, so now I have a total of nine together!” she says (as
well as, bli ayin hara, some forty grandchildren). The reason she
dreamed of nine, however, has rather somber origins. “My mother
had nine children,” she begins, and almost immediately her eyes
begin to well up. Rabbi Safran, standing nearby and talking to the
photographer, notices this and warns her tenderly, “Mameleh, don’t
get worked up.” He has clearly seen this before.
Eyes still wet, Clary continues, “My family comes from
Hungary, from a Jewish village known as Szerenes. My parents
and their first five children were put into the camps during the war.
My parents came back, but the children didn’t. After that, they
had four more children, but my sister was killed in an accident
when she was only ten years old. The only ones left were my two
younger brothers and myself.”
When Clary turned sixteen, her parents decided there was no
future for Jewish families in Hungary. They managed to leave
legally in 1965, with consular visas, although Clary reports with
some regret, “They had to give up everything they owned.” She
spent time in several countries in Europe, ultimately settling in
Belgium, where she began a successful wig business. The business,
and later her children’s marriages, brought her to New York, where
she bought her current house and then continued to shuttle back
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A charming collection of Italian glass dreidels share space in
a glass receptacle
There seems to be no limit to the ingenious uses of different
media to produce dreidels. Glass, wood, silver, and ebony
complement one another in a burst of creativity
My friend looked at this dreidel and told the
Surrounded by miracles. Rabbi
Safran keeps careful records
of each and every dreidel
in his extensive collection
man, ‘What? This is all you could come up
with for my best friend in New York?’ So the
Peruvian went back to the drawing board
and forth between Belgium and the States. “Now that I’m married,
I’ve moved all my operations to New York,” she says.
There is one souvenir of Hungary among the dreidel collection,
a very simple wooden dreidel bought solely for its provenance.
“It costs two dollars,” Rabbi Safran says with a grin. “The
shipping cost more than the dreidel!”
“In Hungary,” Clary remembers, “we had no money. We had
a handmade dreidel made out of lead, and we would get a boy to
sharpen the tip for us when it became blunt, so that it would spin
better. Our ‘gelt’ was handfuls of dried corn and beans of
different colors.” Who would have thought at the time that
one day the girl with one lead dreidel would preside over a
collection of more than a thousand of them?
An International Collection The
multilingual Clary has lived in many places, and
Rabbi Safran has also traveled extensively for the
Orthodox Union, although he admits to doing most
of his work in New York these days. Between the
couple’s own travels and those of some of their
friends and colleagues, the dreidel collection has
benefited.
Rabbi Safran shows me a carved wooden dreidel
about six inches in height. “You see this one?” he
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22 Kislev 5770 12.9.09
says. “One of my colleagues was in Peru on a kashrus tour. He
came across a local craftsman who whittled sculptures out of wood
with a penknife, so he pulled a dreidel out of his pocket and asked
the man if he could reproduce it for a friend of his in New York. So
this is what the craftsman came up with.
“My friend looked at this dreidel and told the man, ‘What? This
is all you could come up with for my best friend in New York?’ So
the Peruvian went back to the drawing board, so to speak, and this
is what he produced.”
Rabbi Safran lifts up a huge dreidel the size of a soccer
ball, and cradles it in his arms. “This was also carved with
a penknife,” he says, “apparently from a single block of
wood.” Embellished with garlands, it’s the
perfect Chanukah toy — for a giant, that is.
The Spanish-speaking world also produced
two of the Safrans’ more exclusive dreidels:
a pair of porcelain dreidels in milky blue and
white by the world-famous Spanish company
Lladro. “Spain only recently rescinded the act
that expelled the Jews in 1492,” Rabbi Safran
says. “To commemorate welcoming Jews back
in again, they created these dreidel sculptures.”
Clary also shows me a medallion she bought in
Let there be light! A fanciful
dreidel doubles as a light bulb Spain that was cast in honor of the occasion.
The peregrinations of Jews around the globe are well
represented in the Safrans’ displays. A rare, handmade, silverfiligreed dreidel from Turkmenistan was crafted around 1920.
Another antique Russian dreidel is a small cloisonné piece of
enamel on silver; the stem has bulbs that resemble the oniondomed towers of the Kremlin. One of the newest acquisitions is
also from a Russian artist, Gregory Ruvinsky; this one is a dreidel
made of ebony, rosewood, and silver. It has four tiny pillars like a
chuppah, with a silver core inside bearing the Hebrew letters.
Clary points out two dreidels made of delicate gold filigree,
resting on clever gold stands that fold like beach chairs. “These
are some of my favorites,” she says. “They come from Persia.”
She’s also very taken with some of the dreidels with whimsical
themes, such as a Noah’s Ark dreidel showing pairs of
animals ascending into the teivah, or a dreidel in the shape
of a pomegranate. Yet another has a sort of ring with four
little ceramic pomegranates suspended from it, each bearing
one of the letters. You spin the ring, and whichever
pomegranate ends up next to a blue dot painted
on the bottom determines which letter is to
be played. A pointed dreidel rises in the
form of an umbrella, its folds outlining a
Magen David at the wide end.
Both Safrans adore a large dreidel of blue
and transparent glass with filled gold letters that hails from the
Judaica collection of the Caithness Glass Company of Scotland,
and was designed by Helen MacDonald. “The seller didn’t know
what he was holding onto!” gloats Rabbi Safran. “He thought
this was a paperweight!” In its documentation — Rabbi Safran
meticulously keeps a scrapbook with all the certificates and artists’
cards for his more valuable dreidels — the unwitting seller
describes the piece as being “a plumb-bob shape — don’t
know what else to call it.”
On a darker note, as we have just marked the one-year
anniversary of the Holtzberg tragedy, the Safrans point out a group
of gaily painted papier-mâché dreidels from Mumbai.
Their Indian collection also includes dreidel candles,
complete with real wicks — except that they’re much
too pretty to burn.
From Italy hails a bevy of Venetian Murano
glass dreidels in jewel-like colors. Piled into a sort
of glass dish in the shape of a gravy boat, they
look like handfuls of bonbons tossed into a
The world’s premier manufacturers of glass,
ceramic, and crystal have produced dreidels.
The Safrans have dreidels of Lladro porcelain,
Waterford crystal and Lenox china
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Delicate artistry
fuses traditional
with modern
candy dish. Much larger glass dreidels, in contemporary styles
by Israeli artist Shlomi Haziza, are striking for their intense
colors and sleek forms. Another Israeli artist, Eli Yashar,
crafted a dreidel with soldered glass sides like tiny stainedglass panels, and filled it with sand from Eretz Yisrael.
Israeli artists account for much of the Safran collection. A
woman named Amy Gilron produces the Etz-Ron collection,
dreidels sculpted from inlaid Israeli woods. (Similar work is
produced by an American woodworker in southern California,
Buz Wegman, who specializes in spinning tops.) A lovely
stained-glass dreidel is the creation of Leora Fein; beautiful
painted ceramic dreidels are produced by Eran Grebler from
Caesaria, as well as Stefan Egei and Daniel Azoulay. There
are even a few dreidels made of Jerusalem stone.
Some of the more original and abstract dreidels are the
work of American artist Gary Rosenthal. “He’s known for
multimedia work,” Rabbi Safran says. “He’s very well
known; his creations have even been presented as gifts to US
presidents.” As this suggests, any Rosenthal creation must be
quite valuable; I can’t resist asking the rabbi, “What is the
highest price you ever paid for a dreidel?”
Rabbi Safran declines to name a figure, but admits with
a rueful smile: “We did have to raise the insurance on the
house.”
Playing for Keeps Now for the most important question,
at least if you’re a kid: when do we get to play with the dreidels?
Do all these appealing creations really deliver the goods in terms
of spin?
“They all spin,” Rabbi Safran maintains. “Some of them better
than others, but every single one is a working dreidel.”
So does he ever play with them? He smiles a little sheepishly.
“Not much,” he says. “Then again, I didn’t even play much as a
kid! We didn’t have so much; my mother used to make us balls
out of old socks. And when summer vacations rolled around, my
father had a whole program of Torah learning lined up for us.”
Apparently the result of such “deprivation” is that today
Rabbi Safran is a talmid chacham, and if he suffered from not
having enough toys, today he has certainly had the opportunity to
overcompensate by amassing enough dreidels to amuse an army (a
Jewish army, that is). And his eishes chayil, growing up Jewish in
a Communist country, miraculously merited to leave it, establish a
thriving business, and finally meet her zivug.
On Chanukah, we place our menorahs in windows or doorways
so that the light of our Jewish homes flows out into the world. This
Chanukah, we thank the Safrans for opening up their home so the
light of their beautiful collection can shine all over the world for
Mishpacha’s international family. n
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22 Kislev 5770 12.9.09
Small but
precious.
Rabbi Safran
with one of
the smallest
members of
his collection
A wonderland of dreidels, a yearlong
celebration of the miracles in our lives
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A Dreidel Drasha
Rabbi Safran’s soft spot for dreidels is manifest in his 2008 sefer,
Meditations At Sixty: Kashrut, Modesty, Mourning, Prayer and Love
(Ktav Publishing House). The closing chapter — acharon chaviv —
is entitled "The Dreidel: The Miracles in Our Lives."
Drawing from the commentaries of the Maharal of Prague, he
says that each individual is made up of "three elements: the body,
the soul, and the mind"— in Hebrew, the guf, nefesh, and seichel.
When all of these elements — hakol — are directed towards a
connection with Hashem, the result is a meaningful, balanced life.
Needless to say, the initials of these four words (guf, nefesh, sechel
and hakol) comprise the letters written on the dreidel.
"The dreidel teaches us about our own psychology," Rabbi Safran
writes. "We are only 'whole' when all the aspects of our being —
body, soul, and mind: hakol — are balanced and blended." When
we spin in perfect balance, centered around our avodas Hashem, all
our different facets are melded and indistinguishable.
Rabbi Safran explains that each empire that threatened to
destroy Am Yisrael is represented by a different letter on the dreidel.
Babylon, which destroyed the Beis HaMikdash and exiled the Jews,
attacked us on the level of guf. The Persians, whose profligacy
in feasting, drinking, and women is recounted in the Megillah,
threatened the Jewish nefesh; the Greeks undermined our seichel
by seducing Jewish minds with their intriguing philosophies. Finally,
the Roman Empire, the greatest of all of them, tried to wipe out
Jews and Judaism in every way — hakol. The letters of the dreidel
may therefore be understood to represent the attacks of Babylon,
Persia, Greece, and Rome on Judaism, as well as the miracles that
saved us each time.
A quick calculation will show that the numerical value of the
letters on the dreidel adds up to 358. This figure, says Rabbi Safran,
is the same gematria as nachash, the snake who caused mankind's
expulsion from Gan Eden. But 358 is also the gematria of Mashiach,
for when Mashiach comes, all the evil in the world (as represented
by the nachash) will be vanquished, and we will again live in
paradise-like conditions.
Finally, Rabbi Safran distinguishes between a Chanukah dreidel,
which is spun from the top, and a Purim grogger, which is spun from
underneath. From the manner in which these toys are manipulated,
he manages to draw a lesson. During the times of Achashveirosh,
the Jews' sincere prayers, fasting, and teshuvah created the merit
necessary to bring on the miracles that saved them. The "bottom"
of the community — average Jews — produced nissim through a
collective zchus. For this reason, a grogger turns from the bottom,
controlled by the person who holds it.
At the times of the Chashmonaim, however, the average Jew
was on a lower level; so many of them had been swayed by the
lures of Greek culture that salvation had to come from "on top"
— that is, from leaders who were on a higher level, and from
HaKadosh Baruch Hu Himself. Like a dreidel, which is spun from
the top and which, once released, is no longer under our control,
Divine intervention also comes from beyond us and is not really in
our hands.
The bottom line is that, whether produced through our
own merits or the merits of our ancestors, Hashem has always
miraculously intervened in history to ensure our physical and
spiritual continuation. While we are enjoined not to rely on
miracles, it is quite clear that the "Finger of G-d" has written
the outcome of most of Jewish history. Surprisingly, this was
expressed very eloquently by the pragmatic and apparently
unspiritual David Ben-Gurion. He said succinctly: "The Jew who
does not believe in miracles is not a realist."
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Every nook and cranny boasts
a dreidel of some sort
A rather large wood dreidel painted in folklorish Judaic
designs, with grommet holes in the sides, cleverly opens up
to lie flat, with just enough holes to place eight Chanukah
candles and a shamash (this one by Israeli artist Aviva)
This delightful dreidel
is a three-dimensional
tribute to Jerusalem
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