By Maya Spitzer

Amid singing, dreidel games and eating latkes, the community celebrated Hanukkah at the Middle School last Thursday.

The seventh grade chorus performed two English songs and the traditional Jewish non-Hanukkah song “Torah Orah” in Aramaic. The event was their first performance.

The audience joined them in singing traditional Hanukkah songs. Siblings and friends were invited to come on stage and sing with the chorus.

“Singing on stage was so fun,” Eli Haims ’12 said. “I got to come and support my friends.”

Participants ate latkes, dreidel shaped cookies and jelly-filled donuts.

Many of the younger children and middle school students flocked to the game room adjacent to the Great Hall for dreidel contests and Torah-themed Slides and Ladders.

“The game room was open after school and enticed a lot of kids to stay after school, play games and wait for their families to join them in the evening,” Rabbi Emily Feigenson said.

“We want you to bring your grandmas too,” she said, adding that the party was intended to be fun for the entire family.

About two-thirds of those attending were not Jewish,  which Feigenson attributed to the diversity of the seventh grade chorus and the friends who came to support them. She saw this as a positive aspect of the event because it served as an educational platform for raising Jewish awareness among non-Jews and will further Jewish integration in the community.

Although most aspects of the party were borrowed from those of prior years, this year for the first time a handful of prospective students and their families attended the festivities to scope out the community.

Sam Mittledorf, a sixth grader at Stephen S. Wise came with his mother and found the party “really warm and inviting as an outsider.”

Hanukkah begins after sundown on Friday and concludes on the night of Dec. 22.