Category: Cemetery Measurers
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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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There are few particularly religious women in town … who also measure the cemetery.
“Elul days” from Khaim Shoys, Dos Yontef Bukh (1933). Life goes on in the shtetl as usual. Yet, at the same time it is clear to anyone looking that people are trying to be more pious. They are careful not to commit transgressions which, at any other time of year, they don’t even think about.…
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Cemetery and grave measuring
This is a translation of a 1906 German study of Feld (cemetery) and Keywer (grave – from the Hebrew and Yiddish קבֿר) measuring by Russian Jewish anthropologist S. Weissenberg. The original German article can be found here. It actually consists of two articles – the second half, in which the font changes, is an extract…
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Every day I brought her to her place in the old cemetery, where it was her custom to sit on a bit of straw and beg for donations singing a nign from lamentations…
In this extract from Mendele Moykher Sforim’s Fishke der krumer, Fishke describes his wife, a blind orphan who makes her living by singing lamentations in the cemetery. The passage describing the month of Elul, when people would flock to the cemetery to visit their relatives’ graves, turning it into something of a ‘fair’, includes a…
Pulling at Threads 