For Hanukkah last year, Nefesh B’Nefesh (the organization that facilitates and subsidizes aliyah to Israel for North American and British Jews affectionately known as NBN), organized a flash mob on the Ben Yehuda midrachov (pedestrian mall) in central Jerusalem. This year, their holiday treat for us is a music video take-off on Matisyahu’s “One Day.” Since it’s Hanukkah we’re talking about here, “One Day” has become “Eight Days,” and in the video we see eight young new olim (immigrants) dancing and bopping through a tour of all the tourist highlights of their new country. Note the requisite cross section of “ingathering of the exiles” types: a couple of tall, laid back, flip-flop wearing hunky guys (one with kippah, one without), a frum guy in black suit and hat, a soldier, a blond girl, a brunette girl, and a really cute young woman with dreadlocks.

If you’d like to sing along, here are the opening lyrics:

“Eight Days, Eight Day, Eight Days.
I used to lay under the moon, and I’d dream ’bout flyin’
On a plane to the Holy Land. Then I’d wake up cryin’.
Finally my dream came true. I moved to the land of the Jews.
I came on an NBN flight, and now my future’s lookin’ so bright.
‘Cuz all my life I was waiting for, I was praying for
Finding the way.
Ever since my aliyah, every Hanukkah is my favorite eight days…”

My favorite part is the kid dressed somewhat dorkily as a dreidl, who is a real sport about looking and feeling completely out of place with a bunch of ostensibly cool twenty-somethings.