Who we see on the street

One of the weirdest things about being in Israel is that my husband and I keep seeing doppelgangers of people we know from home.

Our first day here we saw the Chassidic version of our friend,know to our kids as Michael Eyeballs. Earlier today my husband and I each saw a young woman at Bina the secular yeshiva who looked just like my niece.

At Shuk ha Carmel my husband was mistaken for a woman's B'nai Akiva buddy. A little while later we saw a man with a striking resemblance to both Tanta Marcia's husband and to Bill Shulevitz.

We saw Paley at the winery. We saw doppelgangers of Anny and Joanie in the old train station in Jerusalem. Both sets of Anny and Joanie, the ones we know from home as well as their doppelgangers are good friends.

To make all of these doppelganger sightings more confusing we also unexpectedly run into people we actually do know. Friday night we walked into services and a woman we didn't recognize said hello to us. It was a woman I knew from camp. She had had an almost relationship with my husband before we had ever met. And to make this all a bit weirder, I had an almost relationship with her brother during that long ago time.

Seeing Faye eating Shabbat lunch at our hotel seemed like a nearly expected thing despite having seen her perhaps three times since 1977.

Our host at Bina had taught two of our kids Hebrew when they were in Highschool.

So that is our time in Israel seeing friends and their doppelgangers.

Comments

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

Search This Blog