Now that the Jewish festival of Hanukkah is upon us, you will see jelly-filled donuts popping up in bakeries across Israel.
Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter
Called sufganiyah (plural: sufganiyot) in Hebrew, they typically only appear around the holiday season, usually showing up at the beginning of the Hebrew month Kislev.
Kislev typically falls around December, but lately, donuts are appearing as early as September.
It's a custom for most Jews to eat foods fried in oil during Hanukkah, such as the traditional levivot, the fried potato pancakes some might know as latkes. The earliest mention of this custom comes from the father of Maimonides, Rabbi Maimon ben Joseph born 1110. The custom is a remembrance of the miracle of a small bit of oil lasting for eight days.
It is believed that sufganiyot came to Israel via Polish Jewish immigrants, who also brought the tradition of eating them during Hanukkah. While the donuts were typically fried in lard at the time, Polish Jews fried theirs in oil or chicken fat (known as schmaltz), due to kashrut (Jewish dietary restrictions) reasons.
In the late 1920s, Israel's Histadrut labor federation pushed to replace the latke with the sufganiyah as the quintessential Hanukkah food, in order to provide more work (preparing, transporting, and selling the donuts) for its members, according to food historian Gil Marks.
Subscribe to Israel Hayom's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories!
This proved successful, as nowadays, more Israeli Jews eat sufganiyot on Hanukkah than fast on Yom Kippur, according to Jewish Action, a quarterly magazine of the Orthodox Union.
The largest bakery in Israel, Angel Bakeries, fries more than 25,000 donuts every day during the eight-day festival. While these donuts are traditionally filled with jelly, you'll see a variety of flavors in bakeries such as Angel and Roladin. In 2013, one bakery even filled their donuts with vodka.
The Defense Ministry also gets in on the craze, buying upward of 400,000 donuts for IDF soldiers every Hanukkah.
This article was first published by i24NEWS.
