Sufganiyot
Jam-filled doughnuts eaten at Hanukkah, above all in Israel, where they became the festival’s food in the 1920s. They are fried in oil, for the oil of the Hanukkah story.
Meaning
A sufganiyah (plural sufganiyot) is a round doughnut without a hole, filled with jam and dusted with powdered sugar. In Israel, Rachel Ringler writes for My Jewish Learning, “Hanukkah and sufganiyot are synonymous”. Bakeries sell them for weeks before the festival, filled with cream, halvah or chocolate as well as jam, and they are eaten through the eight nights the hanukkiah is lit. The frying oil, JTA notes, is a nod to the legend of the Temple lamp that burned for eight days on one day’s oil. American Jews have taken up the Israeli custom, though Latkes are still the Hanukkah food eaten most in the United States. The Hebrew name, the food historian Gil Marks wrote, comes from a “spongy dough” in the Talmud, sofgan and sfogga.
Origin and history
The filled doughnut came from Germany and Poland. Marks found the first recipe for a jam doughnut in the Kuchenmeisterei, a cookbook printed in Nuremberg in 1485: jam between two rounds of dough, fried in lard. In the 1500s sugar became cheaper and the book was translated into Polish, and by 1600 jam doughnuts, called paczki, were eaten across Poland at Christmas, Hanukkah and other special occasions. Polish Jews fried theirs in schmaltz rather than lard and called them ponchiks. In the Land of Israel they took the Hebrew name.
They became the Hanukkah food there in the 1920s, before the state was founded. According to Marks’s Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, the Histadrut, the labour federation, saw work in them for the underemployed of what was then Palestine. Latkes were easy to make at home; doughnuts needed people to make, carry and sell them, and selling began weeks before Hanukkah. My Jewish Learning’s writers date the Histadrut’s declaration to 1920 (Joanna O’Leary) or the 1920s (Aly Miller). By Ringler’s account the doughnut soon overtook the potato pancake as the food of the festival in Israel; in 2017 Angel Bakeries, the country’s largest, was said to fry more than 250,000 a day during the holiday.
Sfinj, the other Israeli doughnut
North African Jews fry a simpler Hanukkah doughnut, the sfinj: a ring of dough fried in oil, dipped in honey and rolled in sugar. Andrew Tobin, reporting for JTA in 2017, gives a theory that Mizrahi Jews brought Hanukkah doughnuts to Palestine first and that the Eastern European jelly doughnut later overtook them; on that theory the Arabic word sfinj, “sponge”, gave way to sufganiyah, a Hebrew word from the same root. Elon Gilad of Haaretz traces the food further back, to the Second Book of Samuel, where a similar food is called a levivah, today the Hebrew word for a latke.
Read next
- Next in Hanukkah symbolsDreidelA four-sided spinning top played with at Hanukkah. Its Hebrew letters, nun, gimel, hei and shin, stand for “a great miracle happened there”; in Israel a pei replaces the shin, for “a great miracle happened here”.
- Eaten on the eight nights the hanukkiah is litHanukkiahThe nine-branched lamp lit at Hanukkah: eight lights, one for each night of the festival, and a ninth, the shamash, that lights the others.
See also
Sources
- How Jelly Donuts Took Over Hanukkah in Israel (Rachel Ringler, 2017), Rachel Ringler, The Nosher, 12 December 2017, My Jewish Learning, article
- Why Do We Eat Jelly Donuts on Hanukkah? (Aly Miller, 2016), Aly Miller, The Nosher, 9 December 2016, My Jewish Learning, article
- The History of Hanukkah Donuts (Joanna O’Leary, 2021), Joanna O’Leary, The Nosher, 23 November 2021, My Jewish Learning, article
- This Moroccan doughnut is Israel’s hottest Hanukkah treat (Andrew Tobin, JTA, 2017), Andrew Tobin, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 5 December 2017, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, article
- Sufganiya: The Doughnut That Used to Be a Latke (Elon Gilad, Haaretz, 2013), Elon Gilad, Haaretz, Word of the Day, 29 November 2013, Haaretz, opening paragraph
- The Hanukkiah (Hanukkah Menorah), My Jewish Learning, article
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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