EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT DREIDELS

The spin on dreidels (Riverside Press-Enterprise)

The History

"There is kind of a legend and folk tale that the game goes all the way back to the time of the Maccabees," Roth said. "Jewish children would play the game as a secret way of studying Torah. It would look like they're playing top instead of studying Torah."

Rabbi Zalman Tiechtel, director of the Chabad Jewish Student Center at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, says that children and teachers would hide and study the Torah, pulling out the dreidel if a soldier were to approach.

"Even if they were hiding in the hills and studying, they still stood strong," Tiechtel said.
The dreidel has been around for centuries, he said. "It's something which was passed on from father to son."

Another history lesson? The dreidel is linked to a European gambling game, most likely German, based on a top, Roth said. "The Jews took the game and gave it a Jewish spin," Roth said. ...

The Rules

The dreidel game is played by splitting chocolate pieces, raisins or other treats among players.
Players spin the top, which has a different Hebrew letter on each of its four sides. The Hebrew letters are nun, gimmel, shin and hay.

If the top lands on:
Nun -- The player gets nothing.
Gimmel -- The player gets the whole pot and wins.
Hay -- The player gets half the pot.
Shin -- The player has to put two items in the pot.

Each of these Hebrew letters is represented in a special sentence -- a kind of mnemonic device -- "Nes gadol haya sham."

The first letters of each word in the sentence correspond to the Hebrew letters on the dreidel. In English, the sentence means, "A great miracle happened there."

It refers to the miracle of Hanukkah's Festival of Lights, or how the Jews believe a small amount of oil left in the temple lasted eight nights, Tiechtel said.

In Israel, dreidels are a bit different, Tiechtel said. Instead of "shin," the dreidels have the Hebrew letter "peh."

That changes the mnemonic sentence to mean, "A great miracle happened here" -- instead of "there" -- because the miracle happened in the temple in Israel.

"Whenever we get an Israeli dreidel, it is very exciting," Tiechtel said.