Author: feldmesterin
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New online talk with the Workers Circle
The month of Elul has arrived, and with it the season of feldmestn (cemetery measuring), geyn af keyver oves (visiting ancestral graves) and raysn kvorim (lamenting over graves). I have a few new materials to share this month, as well as my first guest post and two new ritual guides. For now, if you are…
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Feldmestn – Cemetery measuring by Morris Rosenfeld
A poem about cemetery measuring by Morris Rosenfeld, the “sweatshop bard” best known for his poems describing the hardships of Jewish immigrants in the US. The original Yiddish can be found here. Feld-mestn – Cemetery measuring Walking through the stones, old Mina, And behind her, Fesye-Tsveytl Mina cries and says the tkhine And Fesye lays the…
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Petitioning the ancestors
In Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, people would visit the graves of deceased relatives not only as an act of remembrance, but to talk to them, ask them for blessings and present them with requests which they could take to God on behalf of the living. The practice, known in Yiddish as “geyn af keyver-oves”…
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Inviting the dead to our parties
In the summer of 2018, my little sister Viv got married. Our mother died when she was 2 and I was 4, and I was incredibly honoured when Viv asked me to take mum’s place under the khupe – the wedding canopy. It was only when we were all ready to walk her down the aisle that I suddenly…
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Songs and prayers for cemetery measuring (and what we can learn from them)
As Marek Tuszewicki notes in his study of Ashkenazi folk medicine, A frog under the tongue, the prayers said during feldmestn were of fundamental importance. “According to the author of Sefer matamim, the fundamental significance of this custom … lay not so much in measuring as in pacing the cemetery with prayer on one’s lips,…
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“And the Jewish women … they knew how to go to war with Satan” – an excerpt from A. S. Zaks’ Khoreve Veltn
The following text is an excerpt from Avrom Simkhe Zaks‘ ‘Khoreve Veltn’ – Ruined Worlds – describing Jewish customs in the month of Elul – the month leading up to the High Holidays, and to Yom Kippur, the day of judgement. The Yiddish original is available here. The last two paragraphs describe the tkhines (supplications)…
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A tkhine for making Yom Kippur soul candles
In this extract from his 1899-1912 unfinished autobiographical novel, Shloyme Reb Khayims, Mendele Moykher Sforim, the “grandfather of Yiddish literature”, describes his mother, Sore making soul candles for Yom Kippur in a ritual known as ‘kneytlekh-leygn’ – wick laying. Elsewhere in the book, he also describes women in the shtetl measuring the cemetery. This tkhine…
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“She looked one of the witches from Macbeth, but a folksy, Jewish version” – Soul Candle magic from Y. Y. Trunk’s Poland.
In the second volume of his famous memoir “Poland”, Yekhiel Yeshaye Trunk paints a colourful picture of his aunt, grandmother and other women making the Yom Kippur soul candle. While other memoirs, like that of Mendele Moykher Sforim, Bella Chagall and Pauline Wengeroff describe this ritual as an extremely pious and moving ceremony, Trunk has…
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Gitele the pious gabete of Koriv
This is an excerpt from the memoirs of Rabbi Tuviah Gutman Rapoport, published in the memorial book of Koriv, Poland Here he remembers one particular character, Gitele di Gabete, who, acting as religious leader to the women of Koriv, used to, among other things, measure the town cemetery in times of crisis. ‘Gabete’ – the…
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Incantations must not be taught to anyone
Translation of an excerpt from Abraham Rechtman, Yidishe Etnografye un Folklor, p. 289-298. Rav Yokhanan had the habit of coming to sit by the gates of the mikve, and used to say that ‘if Jewish daughters as they come out from immersing themselves look at me, they will have children as beautiful as I am.’…
Pulling at Threads 