Tag: Cemetery Measurers
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The mayne loshn prayer book
I’ve now posted a few prayers from the mayne-loshn [ma’aneh-lashon], a cemetery prayer book that, based on a 17th century collection of cemetery prayers by Rabbi Yaakov ben Avraham Shlomo Sinna of Prague, remained very popular in modern Eastern Europe, where it was mostly associated with women and particularly with professional cemetery women. Like other…
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How a troubled person should pray by their relative’s grave
On the eve of Yom Kippur it was customary in many Jewish communities in Eastern Europe to go to the cemetery “af keyver oves” – to visit ancestral graves, pour out your heart to the dead and ask them to pray and advocate for the living so that we might be spared God’s judgment on…
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A prayer for those who encircle the cemetery every day
Three feldmesterins in South Russia c. 1906, Courtesy HathiTrust. As Samuel Weissenberg wrote in his 1906 study of grave and cemetery measuring, in some communities, professional feldmesterins or other pious women used to measure the cemetery every day in the last week of Elul. This is a prayer for that practice, from this 1930 edition…
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A prayer for encircling the cemetery from a 1930 edition of the mayne loshn
We’re entering the last week of Elul, the week when Ashkenazi Jews recite daily selichot (prayers of repentant), and when some Ashkenazi Jewish women, including professional feldmesterins, used to measure the cemetery daily or on Monday and Thursday. To mark this week, I’m sharing a translation of a prayer or rather a collection of prayers…
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Excerpt from Rokhl Feygenberg’s “The Winding Road”, translated by Tamara T. Helfer
We have just entered Elul, the holy month approaching Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when Jews in Eastern Europe and particularly Jewish women used to flock to the cemeteries to talk to their ancestors, asking them to act as their advocates from heaven during this period of atonement. I have been working quietly away for…
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Upcoming cemetery measuring workshop in Mount Carmel Cemetery
Unfortunately I’m not able to be in New York this year, but my fellow feldmesterins Sarah Chandler aka Kohenet Shamirah of Shamir Collective, Rabbi Noam Lerman, Eleonore Weill and Chelsea Simon are going to be back in Mount Carmel cemetery for our annual Elul cemetery measuring workshop. Tickets are available here. And you can watch…
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Sore-Rokhl the cemetery measurer of Krinki
In honour of Rosh Khoydesh Elel, a short excerpt from the memorial book of Krinski (Krynki), in Poland, remembering the zogerke, klogerke, beterke and cemetery measurer, Sore-Rokhl “di grobe” (“the fat one”). I have also translated a very short reference from the same memoir to a woman in a nearby village who knew how to…
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Midwives and soul-candle makers : the pious women of Burshtyn
An extract from Yoysef Shvarts, ‘Tipn un geshtaltn’ (Characters and personalities) from this memorial book to the town of Burshtyn, Ukraine. Feyge the midwife The doctors, Mandsheyn and Makh, who began working in Burshtyn from the beginning of the twentieth century, must have really racked their brains to find a way to make a living.…
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Brayndl the Zogerin from Mendele Moykhe Sforim’s “Di Klyatshe”
In this short excerpt from Mendele Moykher Sforim’s Di Klyatshe (The Mare), the protagonist, Yisroylik, who has been suffering from hallucinations, wakes up to find himself being fussed over by his mother and a number of local healers, among them Brayndl, the local zogerin. A title meaning “reciter” “speaker” or “preacheress”, zogerins were women who led…
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The Red Kerchief by Bal-Makhshoves
I’ve recently posted two examples of nineteenth century maskilic literature in which reform-minded authors included some of the women’s customs and roles documented on this site in their critiques of traditional Ashkenazi Jewish orthodoxy. In this essay on traditional charity collection, the literary critique Bal-Makshoves (Isidor Eliashev) describes how these religious women – zogerkes, opshprekherkes, tukerins and…
