Editor’s note: This story comes from food writer Vered Guttman, who shares it in her own voice.

In 1943, my grandparents Rachel and Moshe Akrabi packed their three young children, including my one-year-old father, and took a taxi overnight all the way from Baghdad, through Jordan to Tel Aviv. Two and a half millennia earlier my ancestors made the opposite journey when they were expelled from the Land of Israel to Babylon, where they lived mostly in peace for generations. But, a Nazi-inspired pogrom in 1941, known in Arabic as The Farhud left 180 Jews dead and thousands wounded. It was a humiliating ending to a long lived prosperous Jewish community.

In Israel, my grandparents lived in a small apartment, the only Iraqi family in a very Ashkenazi neighborhood in Tel Aviv. This was my grandmother’s domain. She was a smart woman. Like many of her peers, she studied at the Alliance Française in Baghdad, but had to marry at the young age of 14, a common practice within her community at the time.

In her tiny kitchen in Tel Aviv, she cooked exclusively Jewish Iraqi dishes. She fried thin slices of eggplant very slowly until they became dark golden brown and almost sweet, she pickled turnips, stuffed onions and tomatoes, and made kubbeh (meat-stuffed farina dumplings) with different broths depending on the season. And for Shabbat she prepared t’beet, an overnight dish of stuffed chicken with rice. 

The dishes repeated themselves, but we never got tired of them. Every Friday afternoon, her children and grandchildren would show up — no formal invitation was needed — knowing we would be welcomed with open arms and a bowl filled with anything we chose (after peeking into the pots.)

Once a year my grandmother put aside her everyday classic dishes in favor of a more festive Iraqi menu for her annual Hanukkah party. It was the only time of year when the whole family, including her four children and 10 grandchildren gathered in the cozy Tel Aviv living room. 

Israel is a small country, so families get to see each other and eat together often, but there’s a strict division between grandparents — if one hosts Rosh Hashanah, the other gets the Passover Seder. It’s a system that works, but doesn’t always allow full families to celebrate together. Hanukkah’s eight nights make it easier to gather everyone together and so the tradition of the grand Hanukkah party was born.

My father was in charge of lighting the candles and reciting, by heart, “A psalm of David. A song for the dedication of the house,” or Psalm 30, a hymn said in Iraqi homes on the holiday because some believe it refers to the dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem (Hanukkah means dedication in Hebrew). Then we all sang Hebrew Hanukkah songs — and there were many of them.

Everyone chatted loudly, as Israelis often do, told jokes, and ate non-stop, always waiting for the next dish to arrive. The first platter included sambousak b’tawa, small fried semi-circle turnovers stuffed with mashed chickpeas, onions, and turmeric that are similar to Indian samosas in both name and substance. Then we had fried flat kubbeh made with bulgur and kubbeh batata, a fried mashed potato dumpling (my favorite!), both filled with ground beef.

For sweets we had baba b’tamer, a flat crunchy round cookie stuffed with date paste and cardamom and topped with sesame seeds. Sambousak b’shaker, baked dumplings filled with crushed peanuts or walnuts mixed with sugar, followed. 

The meal would end with huge, store bought sufganiyot or jelly doughnuts — if we were lucky, they were still warm and we would inevitably get powdered sugar all over the place as we took our first bites. Sufganiyot are not Iraqi by any means, but I cannot imagine an Israeli Hanukkah celebration without this Ashkenazi staple.

My grandmother hosted these parties from when her grandchildren were little until we started showing up with our boyfriends. I still remember waiting impatiently for the goodie bags we would get at the end.

It’s been 27 years since she passed away, but every Hanukkah, the family continues to gather for a party in Israel, rotating from one home to another each year. These days it’s a potluck with a variety of Israeli dishes, and the sambousak b’tawa, which my Ashkenazi mother is now responsible for. 

After moving to Washington D.C. more than 20 years ago, my husband and I started hosting our own Hanukkah party with local friends who became our family. Quick homemade sufganiyot replaced the store bought ones and sambousak b’tawa is still in rotation. 

My grandmother’s Hanukkah tradition continues, multiplies, and grows.