Community Gathers in Celebration of Hanukkah

This time of year lends itself to gatherings and celebrations, and here at Brandeis celebrations have been aplenty the past few weeks. Most recently, on Wednesday, December 13, students and parents gathered in the gym to celebrate Hanukkah together, listening to the famous Klezmania Band, lighting candles, and participating in a latke competition. Our entire school also participated in the National Believe Campaign, writing holiday cards that are matched 1 card for $1 by Macy's; our students wrote 4,060 cards!

In lower school CREATE classes, students combined their study of rotary motion with their enthusiasm for Hannukah to design and build wooden dreidels. They spent three weeks engaged in in prototyping, testing, revising, and decorating their dreidels. Second graders partook in an annual tradition of making oil for the hanukkiah. Students had the opportunity to select the olives, press them down, place tubes of olive juice in a centrifuge, and apply cotton wicks to the hanukkiah. “This hands-on experience of making oil is a life-time experience for the students to treasure,” says teacher Orit Solomon. "The story of Hanukkah is coming alive for our students." Third graders learned about Hillel and Beit Shammai and their differing views of the hanukkiah, before working with recycled materials to make their own hanukkiot. And while the band and chorus winter concert at City Hall was canceled due to the very sad passing of Mayor Ed Lee, our students still gave a rousing performance in the Brandeis lobby on Tuesday.