Tis the season
We're one week away from Rosh Hashanah - historically the biggest working week of the year for feldmesterins. I wanted to re-share this...
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feldmesterin
- Jan 27
- 2 min
Bobtshke Kilikovski Cohen, the zogerke who measured cemeteries
In the memorial book to the Jewish community of Volovisk (Vawkavysk, Belarus), I found my second description of a real life feldmesterin....
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feldmesterin
- Oct 4, 2022
- 5 min
How to make soul candles for Yom Kippur
In many shtetlekh (small towns) of Eastern Europe, it was common for the female heads of household to pay feldmesterins to measure the...
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feldmesterin
- Sep 18, 2022
- 4 min
How to measure a cemetery in Elul
According to the feldmesterins observed by S. Weissenberg, cemetery measuring was stepped up after the first selihah, being carried out...
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feldmesterin
- Sep 12, 2022
- 4 min
In the month of Elul
Yesterday, as the rain poured down over our group in Mount Carmel Cemetery, Rabbi Noam Lerman spoke about the importance of crying and...
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feldmesterin
- Sep 9, 2022
- 2 min
Measuring Mount Carmel Cemetery this Sunday
When I started out researching these practices, I never planned to actually do them. That happened sort of by accident. But in the...
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feldmesterin
- May 4, 2022
- 4 min
Gitele the gabete part 2: how Gitele became known as the Koriv 'angel'
Continued translation from Rabbi Tuviah Gutman Rapoport's 'Biography of a generation' in the Koriv Yizkor Book. See part 1 for a...
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feldmesterin
- May 2, 2022
- 4 min
Gitele the pious Gabete of Koriv, part 1.
I found the following description of a feldmesterin and gabete (female community functionary) in the Yizkor book of Koriv, a shtetl near...
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feldmesterin
- Sep 12, 2021
- 2 min
Double, Double, Mi un Tsores ...
According to the ethnographic study I posted recently, Yom Kippur candles made with threads that had been used to measure graves were...
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feldmesterin
- Mar 7, 2021
- 3 min
Witches gotta eat
In Yiddish literature, the practices described on this website are often viewed disparagingly, especially when women used to do them for...
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feldmesterin
- Sep 15, 2020
- 2 min
Rachel's tomb as protection against an evil eye
In kneytlakh-leygn and feldmestn, it seems that it was believed that by laying the candle wicks around the cemetery they would be imbued...
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feldmesterin
- May 31, 2020
- 5 min
Das Feld un das Keywermessen - S. Weissenberg
This is a translation of a 1906 German study of Feld (cemetery) and Keywer (grave - from the Hebrew and Yiddish קבֿר) measuring by...
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feldmesterin
- May 31, 2020
- 5 min
A tkhine for making Yom Kippur candles - extract from Mendele Moykher Sforim's 'Shloyme Reb Khayims'
In this extract from his 1899-1912 unfinished autobiographical novel, Shloyme Reb Khayims, Mendele describes the protagonist's mother,...
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feldmesterin
- May 31, 2020
- 2 min
Extract from Salomon Maimon's lebnsgeshichte
18th century Lithuanian Jewish philosopher, Salomon Maimon, mentions the practise of feldmestn in his memoirs written in 1792-3. In an...
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feldmesterin
- May 31, 2020
- 1 min
Mestn Feld - a memory from Pruzhany (Pruzhene), Poland
This short description of the practise is found in the Yizker Bukh 'Pinkes fun der shtot Pruzhene' - a memorial book written by former...
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feldmesterin
- May 25, 2020
- 2 min
Chapter 4: Stesye and Gnesye - From Moyshe Kulbak's 1926 novel Montok - 'Monday'.
The two little old ladies, who Mordechai Markus saw and started at through his window. Two little old ladies, two cemetery measurers –...
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feldmesterin
- May 25, 2020
- 1 min
Feld-mestn by Morris Rosenfeld
Yiddish Poet Morris Rosenfeld, best known for his poems describing the hardships of Jewish immigrants in the US, wrote the following poem...
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