Comments (0)Good “Gelt”
It’s not Chanukah without those mesh bags of chocolate “coins.”
December 26, 2008Amy Klein
The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles
My family didn’t do Chanukah presents.
Each year, as winter barraged us in Brooklyn, N.Y.—mean, wet sleet, mounds of blackened snow—Chanukah snuck in, to warm our homes.
Twenty-five years ago, the American holiday marketing blitz had hardly begun. There were still quiet moments between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and the Jewish and non-Jewish holidays were not yet inextricably intertwined. No one insisted on pareve holiday displays and “season’s” greetings, not in our neighborhood, anyway.
Flatbush, our Brooklyn neighborhood, twinkled only sporadically with Christmas lights. On my block, there were only two non-Jewish families, and that was probably indicative of the entire neighborhood, where Christmas was the exception, not the rule.
“I’m very much against giving out Chanukah presents,” my father said. The idea of giving Chanukah presents was a custom co-opted from the non-Jews, he added.
But to my mind, presents and Christmas had nothing to do with each other. All my friends got Chanukah presents. The lucky ones got one for each night.
That’s not to say ours was a particularly deprived childhood; nor were our Jewish holidays lacking either. On Chanukah, we went to my grandmother’s for a family gathering with homemade latkes, and at home we had a mail-order doughnut machine that made all our sufganiyot delectable, even as they stained our paper plates with grease.
If this sounds like a Sholem Aleichem tale, let me say that after the candles dissolved, we’d run upstairs to watch TV or finish our homework or go back to beating each other up, or whatever it was siblings did in the age before the internet, video games and IM.
But for that hour, an hour when we were no doubt forced to stay downstairs and interact, we’d sit in the living room near the glow of our myriad menorot and make attempts to play dreidel.
My father wanted us to play, to spin the top inscribed with the letters of the miracle “Nes Gadol Haya Sham,” (“A great miracle happened there”)—and for that he’d give us gelt.
Yiddish for “money,” gelt, he explained, is the real Chanukah custom. Throughout the ages, coins have been distributed to children to play a gambling game during the Festival of Lights.
And today, with the commercialization of the holidays, as Christmas and Chanukah have been blended into a “season” with similar customs (except for tree vs. menorah), gelt remains a distinctive, if kitchy, Chanukah custom.
Now, however, instead of money, it has been immortalized in chocolate: Gold-foil-encased coins wrapped in net bags that are so ubiquitous they have come to represent the holiday.
But what is the real origin of gelt? Is it, as my father claimed, really a long-held Jewish custom? And how did gelt evolve from money to chocolate? These are some of the questions I had as I set out on my journey in search of gelt.
Type in “gelt,” “Chanukah” and even “origins” on the internet, and what you’ll get are hundreds of sites selling chocolate coins, Chanukah gifts and a number of sources on the subject that can be categorized into a few reasons behind the gelt. Among them:
The Greeks made a decree against learning Torah, so Jews gave their children coins to play games with to make it seem like no learning occurred.
Jews must light one candle per night—even if they’re poor, the Talmud says. During this time, the community gave charity so that people would have money for candles without begging.
Chanukah time was a bonus time for Jewish teachers—especially teachers who would travel to remote villages to promote Jewish education. Students would also receive money for studying hard, some suggest.
There is a connection of coins to the Macabbean victory. Two decades after the victory, their descendants minted coins to celebrate their independence.
“This tradition is decidedly European in origin, probably dating from the late 18th and early 19th century, when Jews figured prominently in chocolate manufacturing,” Tina Wasserman wrote in Reform Judaism magazine.
“Fashioning coins out of chocolate would have allowed poor children to take pleasure in the growing Jewish tradition of receiving gelt at Chanukah time.”
Gerrit Verburg, whose Michigan company imports the Fort Knox Chocolate Coins from Holland, says the Dutch company—Pieterman Chocoladewerken—has been making holiday chocolate coins for 100 years.
“The coins in Holland are not for Christmas or Chanukah, but St. Nicholas Day,” Mr. Verburg said.
Others suggest it was a post-World War II invention, coinciding with Chanukah’s rising to the challenge of Christmas. That’s what Jewish historian Jonathan Sarna, co-author of “The History of the Jewish People: Tradition and Change,” said.
The keeper of the secret must be the chocolate-makers themselves, I thought.
But you try calling Brooklyn-based kosher candy companies and asking to speak to their media department.
“Our whaa?,” the receptionist cackled when I tried. I could almost hear her cracking her gum in the background as I was shuffled around from number to number.
In the end, after finally speaking to real people at the major kosher candy companies—Paskez, Liebers, Manischewitz (yes, they make coins too)—it turns out most of them import their chocolate coins from Israel.
There are two major purveyors of candy coins in Israel: Elite (owned by Strauss) and Carmit (purchased by Cadbury).
Elite has been making the chocolate coins since the 1960s, primarily for export to England (Marks and Spencer), France, the United States and even Australia, Elite’s public relations firm said in an e-mail. “The packaging of the chocolate is traditional, reminiscent of the times that people went around with a bundle of coins in a small bag.” Elite’s milk chocolate coins are 28 percent cacao, and their dark is 40 percent.
These were the coins of our youth. Who knew from taste back then? Ours was a less refined food era, before $8 chocolate bars, 80 percent cacao chocolates, food blogs, lactose intolerance and nut allergies (some coins are made at plants with nuts nearby, which is why Paskesz now imports a nut-factory-free version from Holland, a secondary producer to Israel).
It was only after we grew—when we had tasted other types of chocolate from countries around the world—that we realized those coins are, well, waxy. Granted, some of gelt coins were old, maybe saved by our moms from the year before or flown in from Israel months in advance, often lending them a white, chalky sheen, which is never a good thing when it comes to chocolate.
Over the last 10 years, as food and eating have been elevated to art forms, chocolatiers and confectioners have contributed their own fine fare to the chocolate coin mix (almost all certified kosher).
Big-name brands like Godiva, as well as small, private labels, are making chocolate coins special for Chanukah. They use finer fats, better milk, more cocoa and they wait till “the night before Chanukah” to produce them.
“We start with a very high grade of premium chocolate, temper it,” said Barbara Berg from Madelaine Gourmet Chocolates, referring to the controlled cooling of melted chocolate that promotes the formation of small, stable fat crystals in the finished product.
Gourmet chocolatiers are almost changing a Chanukah custom. Gelt, they promise, can be good.
But for me, there is still something about those Elite coins. It wasn’t exactly the taste, because they are still waxier than the gourmet chocolates. But the notes extend long after swallowing, so they aren’t just chocolate anymore.
They are gelt. They capture the memory of Chanukahs past, when the colored candles melted brightly in our front window as we four children sat nearby, trying to play dreidel for gelt, nary a Chanukah gift in sight.
Amy Klein is religion editor for The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles.