sarah in nyc

 I am nearly done mending Judith's tallit.  I love that three weak materials (the worn tallit, the netting and the rayon embroidery threads) together are strong. You need to forgive the photos. My camera is having trouble reading the colors properly. Anyway with the mending essentially out of the way it is now time to construct the new tallit.  My regular readers know that i am self taught as a sewer. What that means is that my skills have improved a great deal over the more than thirty years that I have been making Judaica.  I was smart enough to mostly use the limited skills that I had well. I looked at Judith's tallit again to look at how I had constructed it. One of the things that I love about this tallit (please ignore the neon pink it really is a lovely rich magenta) is how despite being pieced it flows and drapes as if it was made out of one length of fabric. the longer I looked at the tallit the less sure I was of how I actually achieved that. After a whole ...

 I'm actually typing this after the end of Shushan Purim but I thought of  what I am writing below during the minor festival itself. For those of you who don't know, Purim is celebrated on the 14th of the month of Adar, except for cities that were walled at the time of Joshua in the Bible which celebrate on the next day. Any of you who want to brush up on  Purim observances  should click on the link. Image captured from www.abebooks.com My dear friend Racheley mentioned that her son in law would be reading the Megillah on Shushan Purim this year using the melody used when chanting the Book of Lamentations. I was so moved to hear that on this Purim which is filled with so much worry and sadness. In my life Shushan Purim is usually marked by very little. It doesn't require much more than noting that it  exists. Today though, I put on a playlist of old Purim music and mused about the holiday as I worked.  I kept thinking about how unlike the rest of the holida...

This week is a challah baking week. Pesach is just over the horizon. My goal was to make enough challot to last until the week I change my house over to Passover mode.  I also figured that since I was making a yeast dough I could also make my childhood favorite, yeasted hamentashen. They were a bakery staple. Your mother might make the small hamentashen with  the smooth crust and the filling visible. This photo from thenosher.com After megilla reading at our synagogue the tables in the social hall would have stacks of big yeast hamantaschen from the bakery stacked on trays in the middle of the table.  These hamantaschen were big--the size of a sandwich or bulkie roll, sort of  triangular glazed with honey and egg yolk and a sprinkling of poppy seeds would let you know if you were getting poppy  or the dreaded prune hamantaschen. Those were the only two possibilities prune or poppy. The dough was a soft challah dough. I have missed those soft hamantaschen with a ...

  Yesterday was my mother's 9th Yahrziet.  My sisters marked that day last month. This is a leap year with two months of Adar. As with many points of Jewish law, the issue of when to mark the Yahrzeit is up for debate, do we mark it on the first or on the second Adar. One of the things that I love about Jewish law is that  it is possible to hold two opposite ideas in our heads at the same time.  The rabbis that my sisters consulted suggested that they observe the anniversary of  our mother's death during the first Adar. my rabbi told me to observe the day on the second Adar. My mother's death came after a particularly hard Boston winter with snowstorm after snowstorm including one that took place the night before her funeral. One of my sisters remarked that she liked marking the Yahrzeit while it was still wintery in Boston. Our mother's funeral had to be delayed by a couple of days because of all of the snow. The path to the grave for each and every funeral had...