A few weeks ago, I had a dream that I measured my own mother’s grave. She died when I was 4, in traumatic circumstances that left me with PTSD. In the dream, I wasn’t measuring her grave to try to connect with and ask for her help, as was usually the custom but “to put everything back in the right place” – this is what I kept repeating to myself in the dream.   

In fact, grave measuring was sometimes used to “put things back in the right place.” Used to enforce the boundary between the living and the dead, it could be used to deal with a spirit that was appearing in places they shouldn’t be. In this extract from his memoirs – first published in German in 1792-3 – philosopher Salomon Maimon describes his mother-in-law using cemetery measuring to assuage an angry spirit. The fact that she orders the measurement also tells us that in 18^th century Nesvizh, (Nyasvizh, today in Belarus), there were professional feldmesterins who were paid to carry out the ritual.

This story takes place just following Salomon’s unhappy marriage at the age of only 11, after which he goes to live with his wife and her mother in Nesvizh. One day, fed up with the “constant state of war” that existed between him and his mother-in-law, he decides to play a trick on her. During the night, he creeps into her room and, pinching her arms and using a big pot to make his voice echo, pretends to be the angry ghost of his own deceased mother. This is what he describes happening the following day.

“The following morning my mother-in-law arose in a state of great agitation and fear, and told my wife that my mother had come to her in a dream, filling her with horror and pinching her for her bad treatment of me. And, as sign that her dream had been true, my mother-in-law showed her daughter the blue marks on her arms.

Coming home from synagogue, I didn’t see my mother-in-law at home and found my wife in tears. I asked her why she was crying, but she didn’t want to tell me anything. My mother-in-law then returned with tearful eyes and looking dejected. I later discovered that she had gone to the cemetery where she threw herself on my mother’s grave and begged her to forgive her sin. She had then ordered a cemetery measurement and the making of a wax candle, long as the scope of the cemetery[1], to light in shul. She also fasted the whole day and acted towards me with great affection.”

[1] I assume here he means the wick was this long, rather than the candle itself. We know from accounts of the Yom Kippur practice that a thread the length of the cemetery perimeter was often folded, twisted and covered in wax to make a wick for a huge soul candle.

Cite this: Annabel Gottfried Cohen, “Grave measuring to assuage an angry spirit – an extract from Salomon Maimon’s memoirs”.

Salomon Maimon and A. Y. Goldshmidt, Shelomoh Maymons Lebensgeshikhte. Vilnius, 1927. Trans. Annabel Gottfried Cohen

Note: this is a translation of the 1927 Yiddish translation of Solomon Maimon’s memoirs, which can be found online here. This excerpt is on pages 75-76.