על מקומו יבא שלום

I can't say that I know a whole lot of stars in Hollywood, although Claire Danes was one of my kids when I ran an afterschool program in the West Village in the early 1980's. I can say with confidence that lots of the stars of the much smaller Jewish intellectual world are people that are part of my circle. If your synagogue invited someone to be a scholar in residence in the past few years, there is a better than even chance that it is someone I know.

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One of those stars, Rabbi Neil Gillman died this Friday. Rabbi Gillman taught one of my sisters and many of my friends. At his funeral yesterday, so many of his eulogists spoke about Rabbi Gillman's genius at asking the right question.

I was the beneficiary of one of those Rabbi Gillman questions.

Many years ago at one of the first couple of craft shows when I showed my work Rabbi Gillman began looking carefully at my challah covers and matza covers. After several minutes he asked me if I made tallitot for women. I answered that I didn't. He mentioned how he was looking to purchase a tallit for his daughter and was unsatisfied with what the market had to offer. I agreed with him that the tallitot that were then available didn't really work for women.

I thought about Rabbi Gillman's question for a long time. Eventually, I began to come up with answers to his question about tallitot for women. It is a question that I am still answering twenty-five years later.

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Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s 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 father’s. 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 can’t 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...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night. I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1) אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2) אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3) יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

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