Further adventures in Bekeshes and Reklach

Today we attended the funeral of a beloved friend. My husband had suggested that on the way home we would check out the Bekeshes ( long Chassidic coats) and Rekeshes ( long suit jackets) that were at Housing Works- the thrift store.

For those sharp eyed among you, yesterday I wrote the name of the garment at Beketches as it was on the website of the manufacturer.I was more familiar with the term Bekeshe and apparently that is correct as well, so i return to the more familiar pronunciation.

On our walk uptown we saw two young Chabad guys at a table in front of the subway stop encouraging women to light Shabbat candles and men to put on t'fillin.

My husband and I entered the thrift and he began trying on the coats.

He admired the fabric and the workmanship and we were both a bit freaked out at how the garment transformed my husband.

Some of the coats had frock coat like details.

I suspect that if the coats cost $10.00 my husband might have thought about purchasing one for Purim. But while $45 was a bargain for these custom made finely made coats it was too much to pay for a joke.

I did think that the Chabad young men would be interested in the coats. So after my husband and i left the thrift store I returned to the subway station and told the young men that the thrift store had about a dozen Rekeshes and Bekeshes from Fino selling for $45 and they should go into the store once they were done convincing Upper West Siders to light Shabbat candles.

They asked me if I would be lighting candles tonight. I told them that i had already baked my challah and would light candles but would not be laying t'fillin. They said that they would stop into the store and perhaps they would be wearing extra fancy duds as their own mothers lit Shabbat candles.

Shabbat shalom!

Comments

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born, Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...

Two funerals and a birthday

I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today. Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things. When we were at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...

It All Feels Like Yesterday

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...

sarah in nyc

Search This Blog