Another excerpt from Y. Y. Trunk’s famous memoir – a short but sweet recollection of a real-life opshprekherke (healer through incantations) and feldmesterin (cemetery or grave measurer). Like many of the other women documented on this site, she is remembered as being remarkably pious and learned – a description that contrasts somewhat with Trunk’s witchy account of the women in his own family making soul candles.

Beyond Warsaw is a little shtetl called Hendrikov. There lived a Jewess, a widow. She had a small spice shop, with half-empty shelves. The little shop didn’t like making money. She was one of the French-style “women of valour” and was better suited to be a rabbi’s wife or a religious teacher than she was to stand around in a store. She was the only woman in Hendrikov who still wore on her head the old type of headdress with bands.

One thing this woman did have was the gift of gab. Quotes from tkhines and the tsene-rene poured from her lips. She prayed from an old thick korben minkhe siddur [a Hassidic siddur which contained Yiddish translations of the liturgy as well as tkhines.] She knew how to exorcise evil-eyes, and measure graves. She spent more time in the women’s synagogue than at home. If a poor old maid was to get married, she would take her red scarf and go knocking on all the doors of Hendrikov to help her.  When it came to the women of the shtetl, she stirred every pot. Even Yekhtshe, the mikve attendant hired by the community board, was in her eyes not frum enough and didn’t sufficiently watch over the young women when they immersed.

Cite this : Y. Y. Trunk and Annabel Gottfried Cohen (trans.), “The eyshes khayil of Hendrikov”, excerpt from Y. Trunk, Poyln (Poland), (1944).