About This Stamp
Hanukkah is a joyous yearly festival spanning eight days and nights, celebrated by Jews around the world. One of the traditions associated with this holiday is the spinning of the dreidel, a four-sided top commonly bearing a Hebrew letter on each side. These letters — nun, gimel, heh, or shin — stand for the phrase "Nes gadol haya sham," meaning, "A great miracle happened there." This refers to the small quantity of sacramental oil that miraculously burned for eight days during the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem.
The letters on the dreidel shown in the stamp are gimel on the right and heh on the left. (Instead of the letter shin, dreidels created in Israel would use the letter peh for the word poe, meaning "here").
Stamp art director Ethel Kessler combined two elements in her design: the type in the background, designed by Greg Berger, and the photograph of the dreidel, made by Elise Moore. The dreidel is from the collection of Rabbi Lennard and Dr. Linda Thal, who purchased it some years ago in Jerusalem.
Art Director & Designer
Derry Noyes
For more than 40 years Derry Noyes has designed and provided art direction for close to 800 United States postage stamps and stamp products. She holds a bachelor of arts degree from Hampshire College and a master of fine arts degree from Yale University.
Noyes worked as a graphics designer at Beveridge and Associates, a Washington, D.C., firm, until 1979 when she established her own design firm, Derry Noyes Graphics. Her clients have included museums, corporations, foundations, and architectural and educational institutions. Her work has been honored by American Illustration, the Art Directors Club of Metropolitan Washington, Communication Arts, Critique magazine, Graphis, Creativity International, and the Society of Illustrators.
Before becoming an art director for the U.S. Postal Service, she served as a member of the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee from 1981 to 1983.
Noyes is a resident of Washington, D.C.