Chanukah came 13-and-a-half weeks early at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., as a band and a Jewish student choir performed songs about dreidels and menorahs, as well as Yiddish and Ladino music.
Beatrice Gurwitz, the museum’s incoming executive director, thanked the musicians for helping the audience, of about 75, get into the holiday spirit during the United States Postal Service’s first-day-of-issue event on Thursday for its new Chanukah stamp.
“The event is the perfect embodiment of what we do here at the museum every day,” she said. “We explore the history of Jewish Washingtonians and the many ways that it has shaped and been shaped by our broader national story.”
Gurwitz drew attendees’ attention to a matchbook in an adjacent gallery room, which was used for a national menorah lighting in Lafayette Square in front of the White House in 1979 during the Carter administration. Because it was a windy evening, a tall Plexiglas box was put around the menorah, for which longer matches were required. Staffers secured extended matches from a nearby design store owned by Jews.
The president subsequently signed the matchbox—which is on view at the museum—“Best Wishes. (Thanks!) To the Kranish’s. Jimmy Carter 12/79.”
“The story of the first national menorah is a story about our local community—the people who planned the lighting, the people who debated if the lighting was a good idea in the first place and the local shop owners, who helped bring Jewish tradition to a national stage,” Gurwitz said.
“Because of that ceremony 45 years ago, Jewish cultural traditions are increasingly part of our national holiday commemorations,” she said. “This year, when Jews and non-Jews use the Chanukah forever stamp, they will be participating in a long tradition of celebrating diversity in America.”
‘A bit more personal’
Antonio Alcalá, the stamp’s art director and designer, who is Jewish, told JNS that the story of the stamp he created dates back more than 45 years.
“I’m very honored. Of course, I really wish some of my family were still around to see it,” Alcalá told JNS prior to the ceremony. “The stamp began 86 years ago with Kristallnacht.”
The designer’s grandparents sent his mother and her siblings on the Kindertransport out of Hamburg, Germany. His mother ended up in America, and Alcalá grew up in San Diego. The decision his grandparents made led to Alcalá being able to design the Chanukah stamp, which is poised to reach millions, he told JNS.
“That’s what allowed me to be in this position to do this,” he said.
Alcalá told JNS that making the stamp “was a thrill for me. I’m Jewish.”
“It was very satisfying,” he said. He has worked previously on stamps about historical figures. “This becomes a bit more personal,” he said.
He also didn’t need to rely as much on consultants, as he did in the past to provide context about stamp projects.
“I kept having flashbacks to going to my grandparents’ house,” he told JNS.
The youngest of three boys and younger than his two male cousins, Alcalá would go to Los Angeles with his family for Chanukah. “In general, I was low on the hierarchy in terms of activities,” he told JNS, due to his age. But as a five- or six-year-old, he got to light the menorah first. “This was really momentous for me,” he said.
Technically, Jews light a nine-branched chanukiah on Chanukah, and menorah refers to the seven-branched candelabrum in the Temples, but the word menorah is often used for the former as well.
The menorah, he recalled, had candles and “was not overly ornamental. It had a certain decorative element, but it was not fancy, and it was not modern.”
The menorah he designed for the Chanukah stamp, which the Postal Service has released every few years since 1996, lacks a base, suggesting that it wouldn’t stand freely. It has thin, curved arms, but Alcalá took pains to vary the weight of the lines, eschewing symmetry.
“It feels much more human. It feels, to me, a little bit humble in a way. It’s not highly polished or refined. It feels direct,” he told JNS. “When I reached that, I felt like this was starting to reflect more of the attitude that I was hoping would be conveyed.”
Alcalá left candles out of his design—to suggest the role of faith in that gap between fire and menorah, he told JNS—and he arrived at the final design after first working on the computer, but setting that aside and painting in black and white after the design on the screen “felt a little cold and impersonal.”
His first graphic design assignment in school involved designing a stamp with the letter ‘G’ on it, he told JNS. “Mine honestly was not that good. Hopefully, I’ve learned a bit since then.”
The Postal Service plans to print 10 million stamps with his new design, suggesting it’s likely to join some of the other best-known menorahs, including on the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum and on the Emblem of Israel and outside the Knesset in Jerusalem.
“It’s a crazy thing to think that this will be everywhere in the country. Every post office will have at least one sheet of the stamp from Bangor, Maine, to Texas and Alaska,” he told JNS.
Alcalá designed the Chanukah stamp in 2021, so there was no question of referring to surging antisemitism since Oct. 7. He also chose the palette to avoid being political, he told JNS.
“There were things you want to suggest to your audience, but I didn’t want it to be something where somebody said, ‘Oh that’s the blue they used in the Israeli flag,’ or ‘This is the blue that they used here,’” he said. “It’s looking for the color that works for the artwork but also helps communicate the theme without being too overt about references.”
If he were designing the stamp today, approaching the one-year anniversary of Oct. 7, and given the “unique time and a real challenge,” Alcalá told JNS, “I’m sure it would be different.”
But mostly his job involves designing stamps that tell positive stories, which is “always a relief,” he said.
“The United States doesn’t have many ways to brand itself visually. We have the flag, of course. We have our currency. But there are not many other ways that we do it,” he said. “Postage stamps go everywhere in the country on everybody’s mail. It’s meant to say these are the people, the events that we feel are important to us as a nation.”
‘Unifying message’
Michael Gordon, the government liaison director at the Postal Service who was also on hand at the event, told JNS that stamps are planned “several years in advance.”
“Generally speaking, current events don’t get reflected in stamps,” he said. “We want it to be a positive, unifying message.”
The Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee fields some 30,000 recommendations, which it narrows down to 25 to 30 that get unveiled to the public, Gordon said.
Like Alcalá, Gordon, who is Jewish, reflected on Chanukah memories as a child. “It tends to be more of a kids’ holiday,” he said.
Every year, Ezra Academy in Woodbridge, Conn., hosts a big Chanukah production, and Gordon told JNS that the event—a “cute little kindergarten thing”—in which one kid would be the Shamash and others would be other candles, made a lasting impression on him and his siblings.
“I can still remember some of the songs that we sang,” he said. “It was the only time, really, that all of the families got together.” The Chanukah celebration became “an indelible memory” for him, even though he told JNS, “I don’t remember a whole lot of things that happened yesterday.”
In Judaism, as in other traditions, candles and light symbolize hope and resilience, “which I think is so important especially in times like this,” Gordon told JNS.
He prefers modern design. “This is definitely the most modern one,” he said of the Chanukah stamps. “So I really like it.”
“A stamp can be a unifying message,” he added. “It’s the same stamp. It can travel from Alaska to the U.S. Virgin Islands, or Maine to Guam. Much like Chanukah, it can be a family, unifying event.”
Family history
Brig. Gen. (ret.) Mitchell “Mick” Zais, former president of the American Philatelic Society, came to the ceremony from South Carolina, where he is a former state superintendent of education and former president of Newberry College. (Philatelic refers to collecting and studying stamps).
Zais, who has been to about 25 first-day-of-issue stamp ceremonies, is also a former deputy U.S. secretary of education and a former acting education secretary.
He told JNS that his late father Gen. Melvin Zais, a former NATO commander, was the only Jewish four-star general in U.S. history. Mick Zais is still an active collector—generally buying on eBay—and he keeps his collection of some 6,000 stamps in albums.
Thursday’s ceremony at the Capital Jewish Museum was the first such first-day event he has attended for a stamp with Jewish content.
Growing up, he would spend Chanukah every two or three years with his paternal aunts, uncles and cousins in Fall River, Mass.
“It’s nice to connect with my family history,” he told JNS. “I only half facetiously say my dad was a blue-collar Yankee Jew. My mother was a white-collar Southern Baptist. My father used to say, ‘Son you’re half and hawf.’”
