c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) From their homestead in Paradise Valley, Mont., Ron Gompertz and his wife, Michelle Gantt, are having a little fun with the December dilemma that faces many of the country’s estimated 1 million Jewish/Christian interfaith families: Hanukkah or Christmas?

Instead of stressing out about whose holiday to observe, they’re mixing the two. And the couple is urging others to do the same through a Web site and a line of holiday cards and presents pushing the idea of a blended celebration they call Chrismukkah.

Starting Tuesday (Dec. 7), the first night of Hanukkah, and extending through Christmas on Dec. 25, Gantt, Gompertz and their 1-year-old daughter, Minna, plan to whoop it up, baking kosher fruitcake, spinning the dreidel underneath the mistletoe and turning out sugar cookies shaped like candy canes and menorahs.

“We’re not literally trying to start a new holiday,” Gompertz says. “It’s more of a state of mind that interfaith families are in and merry mishmash of the celebrations from two traditions.”

Yet, their Web site, http://www.chrismukkah.com, does proclaim Chrismukkah to be an interfaith holiday, “a cultural gumbo of cherished secular holiday rituals shared by interfaith families with both Jewish and non-Jewish members.” It’s also billed as a way “to help teach children of mixed heritage about rituals from both sides of their family.”

It’s also a way to sell cards _ more than 25,000 ($15 for a box of 12) since the site began taking orders Nov. 1, Gompertz said. Designed by a San Francisco artist, images for the cards include a Christmas tree decorated with dreidels, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer sporting a menorah instead of antlers and Chrismukkah man, a cross between Santa and a Hasidic rebbe. There’s a card proclaiming “Oy! Joy!” Each card carries the message “Merry Chrismukkah.”

Inside the virtual Chrismukkah gift store shoppers will find clocks, T-shirts, ornaments, teddy bears and coffee mugs. After all, as the Web site whimsically proclaims, there are “18 nights of presents” in Chrismukkah so celebrants will need lots of gift ideas.

All of this is in good fun, said Gompertz, who grew up Jewish in New York. He said the humor is designed to appeal especially to interfaith couples in their 20s and 30s. People like Sandy Moreira, 31, and her husband, Rob Malinzak, 32. She’s Jewish. He’s Catholic. Married five years ago in a wedding officiated by both a rabbi and a priest, the couple is raising their 2-year-old daughter and newborn son in Indianapolis. Both parents are physicians and they’re hip. They live in a historic and racially diverse urban neighborhood. They’re teaching their toddler daughter both Spanish and English. And they’re open-minded enough to want to expose their children to both the traditions of Judaism and the Catholic faith.

Still, the idea of even a silly celebration of Chrismukkah doesn’t work for them.

“I see how it’s trying to be funny, but I think it sacrifices real meaning to blend the two,” Malinzak said.

Moreira grew up Jewish, the religion of her mother, while her father came from a Catholic family. They always had a Christmas tree and exchanged presents in the spirit of secular celebration. Some years there was Hanukkah and a menorah. But when friends from Israel told her that Hanukkah gift giving is a distinctly American means of observing the minor Jewish festival, Moreira said she found a deeper appreciation for the differences of the December celebrations. She doesn’t want to make them equal or combine them in any way.

“We’re still trying to figure out how we are going to deal with religion in our family,” she said. “But we know we want to give them what is real about being Jewish and being Catholic. I think that’s why I don’t like the blending, even if it’s just for fun.”

Other critics haven’t been so polite.

In a joint statement, the Catholic League, a conservative Catholic lay organization, and the New York Board of Rabbis condemned Chrismukkah for stripping Hanukkah and Christmas of religious meaning in an attempt to fuse their secular traditions.

“Copying the tradition of another faith and calling it by another name is a form of shameful plagiarism we cannot condone,” the statement said. “Frankly, those who seek to synthesize our spiritual traditions may be well intended, but they are insulting both of us simultaneously.”

E-mails to Gompertz’s Web site have called the Chrismukkah venture “syncretism,” the blending of two dissonant things. One angry writer accused Gompertz of supporting Jews for Jesus. Others have said Chrismukkah is another example of how intermarriage has become a “demographic holocaust” of the Jewish people.

“I didn’t want to give much thought to the worry that the Jewish community has about Jewish continuity,” said Gompertz, who was raised in a Jewish home by parents who had escaped Nazis in World War II. “There’s a lot of fear and anger in the Jewish community and we (interfaith families) become the scapegoat.”

(OPTIONAL TRIM BEGINS HERE)

The Jewish Outreach Institute, a research organization, has been trying to help the Jewish community respond to interfaith Jewish families since it opened at City College of New York in the late 1980s. Despite Chrismukkah’s whimsical intent, institute leaders said it doesn’t help interfaith families deal with the very real religious issues they face. One of the institute’s biggest concerns is that synagogues and Jewish religious schools have not done enough to reach out to interfaith families.

To many in Jewish leadership, interfaith families are not legitimate Jewish families, said Paul Golin, assistant executive director of the institute. And that leaves more than one-third of the estimated 3 million Jewish families in the United States on the fringes of Jewish life, he said.

“We in the Jewish community are not providing enough Jewish stuff to interfaith families, to help them be Jewish, celebrate Jewish and raise their children Jewish,” Golin said. He praises the Lubavitcher community in Philadelphia that is putting on Hanukkah fairs in shopping malls and the proliferation of Jewish book fairs and film festivals in San Francisco and Indianapolis, efforts that bring Jewish life outside the walls of synagogues.

“We need more of these kinds of outreach because when there aren’t enough options, Chrismukkah becomes the option. This should be a wake-up call for the organized Jewish community.”

(END OPTIONAL TRIM HERE)

Gompertz and Gantt didn’t set out to trumpet a wake-up call, start a revolution or even make a lot of money. As with countless other interfaith couples who discovered the need to deal with religious differences after becoming parents, they say they just wanted to bring a little good humor to the sometimes rocky road interfaith families must travel.

Yet within that longing for levity, Gompertz said there may be a serious message both for those who have embraced Chrismukkah and for its critics. Here’s how he has been responding to the critical e-mails, negative correspondence that he says is far outnumbered by messages of support:

“This is about tolerance and understanding. This is not about religion. This is about the silly, non-religious aspects of the month of December. Please don’t take it so seriously,” he said.

KRE/PH END RNS