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RIVER EDGE - When teacher Honny Aron asked her first-graders on Friday to discuss the meaning of Hanukkah, Avi [B.] needed no prompting.

"God made a miracle," said the 7-year-old Teaneck boy.

The question, however, probably wasn't much of a challenge for even the youngest pupils at Avi's school, the Rosenbaum Yeshiva of North Jersey. The private school stresses rigorous study of Jewish texts along with the usual reading, writing and arithmetic.

Indeed, Avi's class had already written stories this week on the holiday - in Hebrew.

"They have absolute comprehension," Aron said. "And they took what they wrote and drew their own pictures."

Hanukkah, which begins Sunday at sundown, marks the victory of a band of Jewish fighters in the second century B.C.E. over a foreign monarch who occupied Judea and outlawed Judaism.

In a sixth-grade class, students had plenty of questions for their teacher, Rabbi Yisrael Kohn.

Why, asked Yoni [W.], didn't God punish the enemy troops when they were in the Jerusalem temple?

Kohn replied that the temple had already been desecrated.

"The full glory of [God] was no longer present," he said.

Jews celebrate Hanukkah for eight days, giving gifts, eating potato pancakes called latkes, and playing with a spinning top, or dreidel.

With the holiday looming, the mood on Friday wasn't completely focused on academics.

The younger students played with dreidels and made menorahs, the candelabrum Jews light each night of Hanukkah.

Avi, the first-grader, said that besides God's miracle, he was thinking about the candy coins with the gold wrappers.

"It looks like money," he said. "But it's chocolate and called gelt."

E-mail: chadwick@northjersey.com