Tkhines

feldmesterin

"Incantations must not be taught to anyone"

Translation of an excerpt from Abraham Rechtman, Yidishe Etnografye un Folklor, p. 289-298. Rav Yokhanan had the habit of coming to sit...

feldmesterin

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...

feldmesterin

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...

feldmesterin

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...

feldmesterin

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...

feldmesterin

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...

feldmesterin

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,...