Remember spinners? They were fun.
The Hanukkah spinner is called a dreidel in Yiddish, related to the German verb drehen, meaning to turn. In Hebrew it’s a סביבון:
קוראים לו סביבון כי הוא מסתובב ומסתובב.
It’s called a sevivon because it turns and turns.
But the סביבון is more than a spinner. Historically Jews in the Diaspora played games with it, using it as a sort of dice. On each of its four sides a different Hebrew letter appears – נ, ג, ה, ש. Each letter represents one of the following four Hebrew words:
נס גדול היה שם.
A great miracle was (happened) there. (“There” refers to the Land of Israel, where the Hannukah story took place thousands of years ago.)
And when Jews began returning to the Land of Israel en masse, new סביבונים (dreidels) were printed with the letters נ, ג, ה, פ, representing:
נס גדול היה פה.
A great miracle was (happened) here.
