Hanukkah (Hebrew: חנוכה, alt. Chanukah), also known as the Festival of Lights, is an eight-day Jewish holiday commemorating the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem at the time of the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire in the 160s BCE. Hanukkah is observed for eight nights, starting on the 25th day of Kislev according to the Hebrew calendar, and may occur from late November to late December on the Gregorian Calendar.
In the Chanukah season, December 1939, three families of Jews (the Friedman, Geller and Korczak Families) were saved from the Nazi-occupied village of Puck, Poland by agolem. Appropriate to the holiday, the families escaped in a boat whose meager supply of fuel was miraculously extended to take them in safety to the coast of Sweden.
When the Avar and Slav sorcerers invoked a fire-goddess for a spell which put out all the fires in besieged Thessalonica, George had the idea that the Jews of Thessalonica might have been immune to the spell. He went to the Jewish Quarter and found that it was indeed so, and got from his Jewish friend Benjamin the coppersmith a burning flame with which he re-lighted fires in the Christian part of the city. Benjamin compared the Jews' immunity to the fire-spell with an earlier miraculous event - in the aftermath of the Jews' rebellion against Hellenist rule in Jerusalem, a small cup of consecrated oil had been enough to feed the fire in the Temple for whole eight days. George was of course familiar with the city of Jerusalem, where Jesus was crucified, but he did not hear before of this particular miracle, which was part of Jewish rather than Christian history. However, George saw no reason to doubt the story, having seen with his own eyes the effectiveness of the Jewish God's care for His worshipers.
