Tag: Prayer leaders
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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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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 