Category: Mourning Women
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Yom Kippur in Horokhov
This short extract from Malke Varad’s memoir of her childhood in Horokhov – published in this Horokhov Yizker Bukh – describes the deep emotion that used to accompany the lighting of soul candles on Yom Kippur. The public expression of emotion was an important part of Ashkenazi women’s religious practice in particular, and one that…
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Esther-Khaye the Zogerin of Zabludow
As soon as Rosh Khoydesh Elul comes around, Esther-Khaye the zogerin appears on the scene. For most of the year, we don’t see much of her. She is a quiet, modest Jew, with a shrivelled face. Her hair is always covered by a scarf, both in summer and in winter. Her face and her clothes…
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Dvoyre the Mohilev Community Caller
An extract from A Litvin’s “Yudishe Neshomes” (Jewish souls), a collection of remembered characters and images from the Jewish past in various parts of the world. Here he describes Dvoyre, the cemetery prayer leader in Mohilve, Belarus. In other places, this kind of woman who worked in the cemetery might have been called a “ma’avar-yaboknitse”…
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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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“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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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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Children lament their mother in Brestetshke
‘Examples of laments by children’, collected by Moyshe Melman in Brestetshke (Beresteczko, Berestetchka, Brestetshke, ברסטצ’ק, Brestitski) in response to a 1928 survey by the YIVO ethnographic commission. Original Yiddish published in Itzik Gottesman, ‘Yidishe Klogenishn’, YIVO Bleter Vol.4 (2003), p. 137-155. Translated by Annabel Gottfried Cohen. I’m walking slowly along the footpath. Suddenly, I hear…
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A woman’s lament for her husband
This klogenish (lament) is one of several collected by the YIVO ethnographic commission in the 1920s and 30s. The full collection can be found in an article by Itzik Gottesman, ‘Yidishe Klogenishn’ (Yidish laments) published in YIVO Bleter in 2003. Over the next few weeks, I will be sharing a few of these klogenishn in…
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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 