The dominant image on this lamp is Judah Maccabee, the leader of the revolt that brought about the liberation and rededication of the Jerusalem Temple. Yet despite his importance to the holiday, he was rarely represented on Hanukkah lamps over the millennia. The rabbis of antiquity placed a new interpretation on the events of the story, stressing divine intervention, rather than human courage and strength.
It is only in the twentieth century that Judah Maccabee begins to appear on lamps, although small stock figures of soldiers on German lamps of the eighteenth century may have been a reference to the hero. The Zionist call for a return to the land of Israel and a new kind of Jew who could farm and defend it revived the association of the holiday with the military heroes of the Hanukkah tale. In the mid-twentieth century, the struggle for Israel's independence and the new miraculous victories that took place were seen to echo those of the Maccabees in ancient times. As a consequence, images of modern soldiers and of the ancient fighters began to appear on Hanukkah lamps.
Frederick J. Kormis was trained in Frankfurt but fled to London in 1939 to escape the Nazis. He is known primarily as a medalist. In the early 1940s, he created more than seventy-five portrait medals commissioned by Samuel Friedenberg for a Jewish "Hall of Fame". This series later became part of the collection of The Jewish Museum.