Rick Rubin’s treasured collection is not based on value but rather on memory, tradition and heritage.
For the past two decades, Rubin, 54, has amassed more than 500 drei dels, creating a collection that has helped him embrace an artistic side of Jewish faith and community. A dreidel is a four-sided spinning top used in a game of chance played during Hanukkah. Children usually compete for foil-wrapped chocolate “coins.”
“I used to play with dreidels as a child, and I never thought of them as an object of Jewish art,” says Rubin, a Denver real estate attorney and president of the Hebrew Educational Alliance.
He stumbled upon the first piece in his collection during a vacation in Boston. While milling about in a Judaica store, he found a ceramic dreidel. This was not like the toy pieces of plastic manufactured in China he had played with during the 1950s. An artist had lovingly designed it and painted it by hand.
“If you compare it to what you can find today, you would never look at it and say, “Oh my God, that piece is fabulous,” Rubin says. “It’s very simple. But I had never seen a dreidel as an object of art, and it totally caught my attention.”
Older dreidels — such as one in Rubin’s collection dating to the 1920s, made of lead and unearthed from a Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland — are more utilitarian and so were not collected when they were made. They are thus more difficult to find.
Each side of the dreidel bears a letter of the Hebrew alphabet — “nun,” “gimmel,” “hay,” and “shin” — abbreviating the phrase, “Nes gadol haya sham,” or “A great miracle happened there.”
Hanukkah, also known as the Festival of Lights, is an eight-day holiday commemorating the victory of Judah Maccabe over the Greek-Syrian Antiochus and the rededication of the temple in Jerusalem that followed. The legendary miracle was that after cleansing the temple of idols, there was only enough consecrated olive oil to keep the eternal flame burning for one night. But that one day’s supply miraculously burned for eight days and nights.
Dreidels made in Israel substitute the letter “pei” for “shin,” changing the phrase to “Nes gadol haya po” or “A great miracle happened here.”
While Santas, reindeer, snowmen or typical symbols associated with Christmas are plentiful, Rubin says dreidels “are finite” and not mass produced.
His collection ranges from contemporary items, such as the green-colored “Shrek” dreidel he bought to entertain his children, to one created in 1880 in Poland and made of wood inlaid with bone.
One piece shines with the brilliance of gold and diamonds, while another piece is tiny and nondescript.
Every year, Rubin raids his cabinets and selects pieces to put on display at the alliance synagogue.
Here are some of his favorites.
Sheba R. Wheeler: 303-954-1283 or swheeler@denverpost.com
