After more than three weeks of feasts, prayers and days off from work and school, Israel’s busy holiday season — from Rosh Hashanah through Simchat Torah — finally ended earlier this month.
O.J. Simpson dropped in all the time. Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft were regulars, as were Robert Blake and Jayne Mansfield. Steve McQueen pedaled up on his bicycle. Now the star clientele at Stan\’s Corner Donut Shoppe in Westwood tends to be more on the intellectual side.
Q: What\’s better than a piping hot Krispy Kreme doughnut?
The historical foundations of Chanukah are well documented, in the Apocrypha\’s First and Second Books of the Maccabees and \”The Jewish War\” and \”Jewish Antiquities,\” written by the Jewish historian, Josephus, in the first century of the common era. As these sources relate, in the year 167 B.C.E. the king of Syria, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, decreed that only pagan gods could be worshiped in the temples, and the practice of Jewish rituals, including circumcision and Sabbath observance, was outlawed under penalty of death. Although many Jews, looking to assimilate into Hellenic society, acceded to Antiochus\’ decrees, an elderly priest named Mattathias and his five sons (the middle son would become known as Judah Maccabee or \”Judah the Hammer\”) bitterly opposed them and, after raising a rebel army, headed to the hills.
Not since the gas lines of the 1970s, perhaps, has a commodity been in such high demand. With the arrival of North Carolina-based Krispy Kreme in Southern California, it seems people can\’t get enough of the sweet stuff the company\’s been selling for 62 years.
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