Category: Prayers, Laments, Incantations
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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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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.’…
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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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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…
Pulling at Threads 