A blog, mostly about my work making Jewish ritual objects, but with detours into garment making, living in New York City, cooking, and other aspects of domestic life.
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For those who are standing between the sea and the dry land
Today is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. This year the liberation comes just as the hostages in Gaza are being released drip by drip. It's an anxious time of high emotions.
At my synagogue, like so many other across the globe, this prayer is sing during services as a prayer of hope for the liberation of the hostages.
When I hear this sung in synagogue I am usually too choked up to sing.By the time we get to the line about being between the sea and dry land my tears begin. I stand with everyone else but instead of singing I just cry.
The melody was written by Abie Rotenberg who was part of the great flowering of folk/rock Chassidic music composition here in New York starting in the late 60s and early 1970s. This melody is sung by Jews across the religious spectrum. The melody amplifies the words and the emotions of the text.
As you see from these (only three) arrangements it's truly sung by a wide swath of the Jewish world. This melody has been my earworm for the past while.
This morning one of my cousins texted me this letter.
You can double click it to see it larger. This letter was written to my Aunt Irene, my father's twin sister in June of 1938. My father and his sister had turned eleven just before this letter was written. They had raised money to help liberate a German Jewish girl and send her to Palestine.
A very little bit of Google searching helped me to understand this a bit better. Between 1933 and 1939 ( and especially between 1938 and 9) there was a push by Youth Aliya to get kids out of Germany and Austria and bring them to Palestine. Terrible things were brewing in Germany and Austria. It cost $360 to transport a child to Palestine and support them for two years. I assume that this also included what one had to pay to the German or Austrian government to allow the child to leave.Youth Aliya saved over five thousand children between 1933 and 39.
My aunt told me today that she and my father used to stand on street corners in Miami asking for money from passersby for this project. I don't know exactly how much of that $360 Irene and my father raised but it was enough to warrant this letter.
The language of the letter echoes the language of the prayer I quoted at the beginning of this post.
There are people who say that Americans, including American Jews had no idea about the situation for Jews in Europe before the Holocaust. And yet, two children in Miami, (which in 1938 was a Jewish backwater) were concerned enough about what was going on in Germany to stand on street corner, askings for change from strangers and do their best to save a child from death.
A few months ago I had a craving for my fatherās chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my fatherās. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I canāt remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...
×Ö°× Ö¶×Ö±×Öø× ×Ö·×ŖÖ¼Öø× ×Ö°×Ö·×Ö²××Ö¹×Ŗ ×Öµ×ŖÖ“××: ×Ö¼Öø×Ø×Ö¼×Ö° ×Ö·×ŖÖ¼Öø× ×Ö°×Ö¹×Öø× ×Ö°×Ö·×Ö¼Öµ× ×Ö·×Ö¼Öµ×ŖÖ“×× You are faithful to restore the dead to life. Blessed are You, Adonoy, Resurrector of the dead. That particular line is recited at every single prayer service every day three times a day, unless you use a Reform or Reconstructionist prayer book . In those liturgies instead of praising God for resurrecting the dead God is praised for giving life to all. I am enough of a modern woman, a modern thinker, to not actually believe in the actual resurrection of the dead. I don't actually expect all of the residents of the Workmen's Circle section of Mount Hebron cemetery in Queens to get up and get back to work at their sewing machines. I don't expect the young children buried here or the babies buried here to one day get up and frolic. Yet, every single time I get up to lead services I say those words about the reanimating of the dead with every fiber of my being. Yesterday, I e...
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