sarah in nyc

 Perhaps it is because of a bit of Old Worldness my mother had, but as we get ready to leave this evening to visit our son in Israel my husband and I are also doing some "in case the plane crashes and we die" prep. We have let our daughter know where the essential papers are. No, I am not sharing that information with you. I also did a wander around the neighborhood thinking perhaps this is my last look at the familiar. The autumn roses have begun blooming in Spare Change Plaza ( the plaza in front of the 96th Street subway station). The pigeons are busy, as they always are, in front of what had been the public bathrooms but is now a community art exhibition space. The building on the north east corner of Broadway and 96th street that in 1900 housed a drugstore, and until recently a Citibank and a florist is in the process of being torn down. It may be gone by the time we get home. I stopped by the thrift store just to fill my eyes with new things. The store stock was just r...

I was able to unearth photos of my great aunt's grave. Fanny, Feige Tzivia as she was known in the family was my grandfather's little sister. Below you see her with her husband Nathan. The enamel portrait of Feige Tzivia was torn away. The Hebrew reads "Here lies a woman of young days, Mrs Feige Tzivia, Daughter of Zalman Pesach who died on the fourteenth of Tishrei". The fourteenth of Tishrei is this Friday. My sister will light a yahrzeit candle for her. I won't be able to light a candle since I will be in the air on my way to Israel. My mother was born just a few years later and carried her aunt's name. I am not going to catalog all of the ripples of loss and grief that followed the death of Feige Tzivia, but 101 years later some of those ripples are still being felt. I was able to share this photo with Feige Tzivya's grandchildren and it gave them all a measure of comfort. You too can use findagrave.com to look up your own relatives.

a meaningful Yom Kippur.  

 The meals were eaten. The shofar was blown and now it is time to squeeze in as much work as I can before we leave for Israel to visit our son--right after Yom Kippur. A few weeks ago I met with a new client. Bonnie grew up on the coast of southern Massachusetts and now lives just north of Boston on the sea. Bonnie is the daughter of someone who ran a textile mill so fabric is in her bones.  When we met she realized that she wanted the stripes on the tallit to look like the ocean of her childhood home. While the body of Bonnie's tallit would be made out of a lovely raw silk, the stripes would be painted on a smooth faced silk. I felt fortunate when I found a length of super heavyweight silk charmeuse that was left over from a tallit I had made a while back. Before I began painting, I spent a long, long time looking at images of the ocean off the coast of southern Massachusetts, actually the beach I went to most often as a child. When the colors were set in my head I got to wor...

 Through all of the mad sewing of this past week I still had to get ready for Rosh haShanah.  As always my journey towards self reflection begins with cooking vast quantities of food. I stated this year's journey by consulting the flyleaf of my Settlement Cookbook. These are the notes I took during a long ago rambling conversation with my mother. Do not follow my mother's instructions regarding amounts. The correct amount for each item on the list is more. I  brown the onion and the meat on the stove top and then just put my covered roasting pan in the oven on a low temp---for a long time. This is a before shot. I have replaced the white potato with yucca and other mystery tubers because I love my potato allergic son in law. Here are two stages of after... cooked and then in the freezer. I ended up with three gallons of tzimmes. At some point I baked challah. I didn't have the mental energy for cute shapes. They are round. this year--- that's good enough. The loaves are...

 The Schechter Mappah is complete!!! This is the view that the people leading services will have of the piece--- a gateway into the experience of prayer. The Torah readers will view the mappah this way. Tucked beneath the edge of the mappah are the blessings for the Torah. On the other side of that piece is the misheberach for the ill in the community. The other text panels  also flip. Here is the introductory text for the weekday Torah reading. "Turn the page", and you have the introduction for Shabbat. The text panel on the other side of the mappah has the half kaddish on one side and the text that you recite right afterwards, as the Torah is lifted, on the other side. Officially this was a restoration job. I would say that probably 80% of what you see here is new and reconstructed. The blue wool sky with hand embroidered clouds replaced the hopelessly stained  hand dyed and hand embroidered white wool sky that had been there previously.  The striped silk "masonry...