sarah in nyc

Makom kavua  is a Hebrew term for having a set spot to sit in synagogue. I remember  my teachers in elementary school and high school urging us to select a makom kavua   for services. I also remember how you could get one of your classmates to move out of a seat in the school synagogue by claiming the spot as your makom kavua. Amazon.com Widgets My father's  makom kavua at Temple Bet El on Shabbat was on the bima. During the week he sat in the first seat on the left hand side of the aisle. When my father attended morning services when he visited me in New York he had his seat as well. Once when my parents were visiting me I attended Friday night services with my father. I sat next to my father. He then turned to me and asked me if the spot where I was sitting was my makom kavua,  it wasn't. So my father told me that I ought to go sit in my usual seat. I did, because frankly, I was more comfortable davening from my spot. For my father, sitting in you...

When it was time for my daughter to study for her Bat Mitzvah we hired a teacher to work with her. Either my husband or I could have taught her, but given where she was emotionally at the time, it seemed better to have her learn with someone else. When it was time for my older son to begin to study, I started to work with him with the assurance that if he wanted to work with someone who was not his mother, we would find him a teacher. We worked in little snippets of time early in the mornings. I don't think we could have found a teacher to show up for ten minutes at a time, at 7:00am. We worked well together. We have a fairly easy relationship.r When our youngest was 10 or so, my husband went to a charity auction. One of the items in the silent auction was Bar Mitzvah lessons with Jerry. Jerry runs an alternative Hebrew School and has prepared hundreds and hundreds of kids for their B'nai Mitzvah. my husband bid on the lessons and won. Jerry was one of the people that helped...

Most tallitot have stripes. Most of those stripes fall into one of several possible stripe patterns. You can see some examples that I had sketched out to give Elisa some ideas of the possibilities. I had already stencilled out the wide stripes, using a commercial architectural stencil. I needed to also do a couple of narrower stripes to work with the wide stencil. Today, at services my friend Jerry showed me the Megilla that had been illuminated as a gift for him by calligrapher Jay Greenspan. All of the decorative elements in the Megilla scroll were taken from our beautiful synagogue http://www.anschechesed.org/ and reproduced in miniature form. Here was the fabulous Moorish style stencils added to the bimah in the 1940's. There were the images from the stained glass windows in our beautiful chapel. When I got home I realized that I could create a smaller version of the lovely Florentine stencil I had used for the wider stripes. I then stencilled the narrower stripes with this si...