While in Israel this week, ahead of running the Jerusalem Marathon, Rabbi Wittenberg has visited a number of projects and written a little about them and other areas of interest:

A New Tallit

I’ve loved my weekday tallit. It’s not one he gave me, but it reminds me of my father. I don’t want to part from it. But it’s faded and has holes; sadly, its time has come. Jerusalem is no bad place for tallit hunting.

It’s ten at night, but a small store on King George Street is still open. I’ve often noted the bric-a-brac outside, tourist items, and walked by. This time I go in. The owner, a gentle old man, shows me a Tallit, light, not showy, modest like my father. I bought it at once.

But the tzitziot, the fringes to remind us of heaven and our responsibilities on earth, were torn. ‘I must replace those’, the man said, ‘Can you wait’? He separated four long threads for each corner, folding each set double to make eight. He sat down, said ‘For the sake of the mitzvah of tzitzit’ and began to tie the complex knots. ‘Were you born in Jerusalem?’ I asked. He pointed to his lips: he would not speak, not break concentration until the knots were done. I too sat silent. He finished a corner: ‘In Persia’. I watched him, a man of yirat shamayim, humility before God, of chochmah, fingers skilled in the subtle winding of the threads.

‘I want to sell my stock and close’, he said later pointing at the remaining Judaica, touristica. ‘Won’t you miss this?’ ‘No; my wife died. I can’t do this alone.’ ‘Recently?’ ‘A year. She was kind, wise, good.’ He looked down.

We said warm goodbyes. ‘I’ll think of you when I wear this Tallit’, his presence, and memories of my father, woven into the threads.

The Library

‘Can you look over my grandfather’s books,’ Rivana asked me. Since he’d passed away his library was housed in her mother’s flat, next door to where she and Simon Lichtman had kindly enabled me to stay.
There were the Talmuds, Babylonian and Jerusalem, a heavy set of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, two-hundred-year-old volumes of the Chummash and Tenach, books in Yiddish on history, politics, science, poetry. There were four volumes on the history of the Jews of Lithuania, – from after the terrors. Yiddish must have been for him where Judaism and the rest of the world met.

‘Tell me about your grandfather.’ On the wall was his semichah, attesting to his ordination. It was from the great Lithuanian Yeshivah of Slobodka, dated 1927.

‘Soon after, my grandparents came to New York. My grandfather was interested in everything; he was widely learned. When anyone came to see him about conversion, he would say “Let’s see how we can make this work”. In 1943 he joined a march of rabbis to Washington to protest America’s treatment of refugees.’ I want to know more about this.

There was a second certificate on the wall, in honour of Rivana’s grandmother. The Rabbinical Seminary of America thanked her for her support of the congregation and the rabbinate. It was as far as an orthodox body could go in recognising the contribution of a remarkable woman.

Open their covers and books yield the soul the person who loved them. We sat quietly with the spirit of Rivana’s grandparents.