Author Archives: pritzker

Shabbat Khayal

Nationality: Israeli and American
Age: 42
Occupation: mother, business owner/retailer
Residence: Beverly Hills
Performance Date: 4/20/16
Primary Language: Hebrew
Language: English, Farsi, Spanish

The informant is an Israeli American who grew up practicing traditions from both her Israeli and Persian culture. She describes a custom surrounding the sending off and return of teenagers who are drafted as soldiers. The informant recalls one of these parties that she attended when she was young.

  • Shabbat Khayal is an Israeli tradition having to do with young soldiers. There is a kind of sending off that people do, when they first are um drafted. And so people have you know: goodbye parties, they’ll have um celebrations and then everybody holds their breath until soldiers get through their training which is like an intensive three months that they don’t really see family and its you know really crazy and they don’t really see their families and then there is a homecoming and thats a really big deal. The moms will buy all their favorite food and snacks and cook all their favorite meals and get their rooms ready and its like a whole you know and theres an excitement and build up when the family comes over and everybody wants to hear stories and see how that teenager has changed… so um theres that kind of anticipation and you know people know who’s son is coming home and this home’s daughter is coming home and there is a lot of support in the community around it. And once they’re placed within the army, and they kind of know what they are going to be doing for the next two or three years, then they get weekends off here and there, and those weekends are a really big deal. You know, same thing happens- you know family gets together, everybody comes for shabbat, the soldiers are like center of attention. Again everything with the food, they do their laundry, they make sure that they’re resting, that they’re seeing their friends, its like a whole big thing when a soldier is home. And i think thats in the fabric of pretty much every Israeli family.
  • Sometimes people will take them to see a rabbi or someone for a blessing before they send them back out- depending on their background and culture you know if they’re Persian, Ashkenazi Jews, but some people will take them to someone and ask them to kind of say you know thank God, you made it through this far and then before we turn around and send him back you know give a blessing to make sure that he/she is safe and that God watches over them and that they come back to the family. So a lot of people will set something up like that or take them to Jerusalem or something kind of sentimental like that. 
  • I was apart of one of these rituals when I was a little younger for my cousin- it was such a build up, I mean you don’t really hear from them or have contact with them. I mean I can’t even think about what to compare it to here in America, I mean there is not really much- you’re sending a teenager away, and its a high schooler and they’ve just graduated and all of a sudden they are thrown into this entirely different setting, so I just remember my aunt getting everything ready and going to every different market and getting all his favorites and getting them all together and making sure it was all there. And then him coming home and looking so grown up and different and everybody wanting to hear all his stories and how is was, and what does he think he wants to do in the army, and how did he test, and he becomes that kind of center of attention and it will last all weekend, and people will spend the night, and want to be with them and yeah its very special. 

ANALYSIS:

I think that a traditions such at Shabbat Khayal are really important for families who have loved ones at war or in training. I think the whole celebration an already special occasion that much more intimate and important for both the family and the teenager. Most importantly, I believe that people continue to have these celebrations not only because it is tradition, but because it gives the family and the teenager something to think about and look forward too, instead of the family anxiously waiting around for the teenager to return they have the opportunity to run around preparing and gathering friends and family, focusing on what is most important in life.

 

 

Turtle Man in Turtle Bay

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Illinois
Performance Date: 4/2/16
Primary Language: English
The informant is a 2o year old classmate and friend of mine who was excited to share about her camp’s urban legend.
I went to a camp called Lake of the Woods Camp for girls, I was a camper for 8 years, and went for 8 weeks every summer since I was 7.
So its just kind of a camp legend that we’ve always had. theres this story about Turtle man- the legend of turtle man, and theres this place called turtle bay at camp and its part of our lake at camp and its filled with sulfur and so it smells really really bad. So the urban legend goes that there was a counselor who was really mean to all the campers- he worked at Greenwood’s Camp for Boys, and so um the counselor was really mean, just not a nice person- beat the campers, was awful to them. He would smoke cigarettes in the cabin, and he was just so rude to them and he told them if you tell your parents who i am I’m going to kill you all or something like that because he was an ex military person. And he um one day the boys decided to pull a prank of him because they hated him so much- it was fourth of july and they decide to pull a prank on him. This was back when you could receive a bunch of packages and have packages with fireworks and they were just going to blow them up and the counselor found them and he said he would confiscate them. So he put them under his bed. Since it was fourth of july, all the counselors like to get drunk and so he came home that night and he was really drunk and was smoking a cigarette and he fell asleep with the cigarette in his hand and the fireworks went off and the counselor ran into turtle bay and he was never seen again- and the myth is that he comes back every fourth of july to haunt the campers.
I first heard it my first year at camp from older girl campers, and now even though they don’t allow ghost stories everyone still knows about it.
ANALYSIS:
I like this piece specifically because it really shows how strong a piece of folklore can be. As the informant mentioned, the camp banned ghost stories, presumably because the age range of kids in the camp is quite large. Even so, the informant mentioned that everyone knows the story anyways and it will continue to be passed down.

Dartmouth Night

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/15/16
Primary Language: English

The informant is a 20 year old student who is currently studying at Dartmouth. He recounts his experience with this initiation tradition and how it made him already feel a part of something.

  • So during homecoming weekend at Dartmouth, there is a Dartmouth tradition that tons of alumni come back to campus and are welcomed back into the frats- and each class builds its own bonfire structure, so my class, being a freshman would be 19, and the number of the year you graduate is placed on the top of the structure ( the structure is made out of wood and it is 50 feet high) I didn’t personally participate in making it but my class did. Then on the night of the bonfire, the entire freshman class starts at one dorm and moves through the campus picking up other freshman from each dorm building and eventually making their way to the green, which is where the bonfire getting ready to be lit. Then the freshman are welcomed into an inner circle around which all the other classes and alumni are standing and chanting. The bonfire is lit by select freshman, those who built it, and the freshman class begins to run around the bonfire the number of laps of their graduating year- meanwhile, all the surrounding upper-classmen heckle the freshman to run across the inner circle and touch the fire (which is completely guarded by Hanover police and security because its technically considered trespassing). Eventually, someone finally breaks free of the lap running and tries to touch the fire instigating others to do the same. Literally the police tackle people. This has been a tradition for a really long time, President William Jewett Tucker introduced the ceremony of Dartmouth Night in 1895
  • me: so what is the significance of touching the fire?
  • If you are caught then you are brought to the police station and the understanding is that an alumni will bail you out of jail, but if you’re not caught, you are seen as a legend from your fellow classmates and the older kids.
  • I first heard about this tradition from a sophomore, who touched the fire himself, and was clearly still prideful of that, it was within the first couple of weeks of school.
  • I actually did an interview about this in the school paper, but touching the fire for me provided the best welcome possible into dartmouth and solidified the fact that this is a good place for me.

ANALYSIS:

I think that initiations can be really important for anyone in-group. In my opinion they immediately create a sense of community and a feeling of belonging which is so important for a group to stay strong and connected.

Sephardic Rosh Hashanah Sedar

Nationality: American
Age: 46
Occupation: Rabbi
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/15/16
Primary Language: English
Language: Hebrew

The informant is Rabbi, working at a temple based in Los Angeles. She explains her religious journey and how meeting her husband and learning his own practices made an impact both on her life and religious beliefs and traditions.

  • So my husband is Sephardic, and so we have this whole ritual around the New Year that has all of these symbolic foods, and is something that without the ceremony is kind of, our Jewish New Year wouldn’t really have the same feeling to it.
  • So, I grew up in a pretty reform family in Cincinnati Ohio, and we were observant but not really I wouldn’t say very ritually bound; we didn’t keep kosher, we didn’t observe a lot o the Jewish commandments, but one thing that was really important to my family was Shabbat and the Jewish holidays. So I was always really into Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and Purim and all of that stuff. And when I was a young adult living in Israel, and I started seeing the man who has become my husband, he comes from a Sephardic background. So something that was so interesting was that I had been celebrating holidays in a certain pretty much my, my whole life and never really considered that there were different way of embracing Judaism because in Cincinnati we were just really not so exposed to other types of Judaism. So when I met my husband, actually the first time that I spent time with his family was on the Jewish New Year, on the first night of Rosh Hashanah and before we had our big New Years meal, there was a ceremony and symbolic foods that were set up all around the table and um I had never heard of it before, I had never experienced it before, so I was full of a lot of questions. Basically what I learned about the whole Sephardic tradition of having a Sedar for Rosh Hashanah is that they are very into the symbolic nature of food. So you have the saying ‘you are what you eat’ um and in the Jewish sense, the symbolic foods, you ingest the types of blessings and the types of direction you want your New Year to take. So some of the items that would be eaten traditionally would be carrots… like a, a carrot and the blessing over it would be that God should ordain for us a good judgment in the year to come, and you eat the carrot and the word is Gevurah or geburah (גבורה) which is the same word as judgment, so its like you’re ingesting a good judgment. There is the apples dipped in honey and thats so that you have a sweet and a happy New Year. You eat pomegranates and the blessing for that is that you should be as multitudinous in your acts of kindness and mitzvoth as many as there are seeds in the pomegranate. One of the weirdest blessings that kind of… that took me a while to wrap my head around literally is that there is a… a hope that we should be at the head of the year and not at the tail, so there is a goats head *laughs* that is a part of the Sedar, and in my husbands family they took that really really literally and at the time, I was a vegetarian *laughs again* so on the table was this like… you know this like overcooked goats head and they served the tongue and my hebrew was not very good at the time and my husband, well he wasn’t my husband at the time, said well you know its just a little muscle and you have to eat it so that the blessing is that we will be at the head of the year and not at the tail… and that was kind of my first experience with the Sephardic Sedar and I think that as I continued to grow in my own Jewish practice and really kind of learn more about the non Ashkenazic but Sephardic traditions I find them to be umm… much more ritualistic and much more superstitious and much more concerned with having your house in a certain order and having certain foods that show that your intentions for this Jewish rituals are really of a very evolved kind of commitment. And the Sedar around Rosh Hashanah, every time that we have it now, we  have different blessings that we’ve folded in and my boys, they certainly know all the traditional ones, but every once in awhile we’ll come up with some new blessings like uhh… last year my kids added celery with raisins so that everyone who ate it would have a ‘raise-in’ their salary and that was something that they thought was really cute, and it actually went over pretty well. But when put around the table with apples and honey, and pomegranates, and we don’t do a lambs head because that’s where I draw the line, we do a fish head, and I’m, I’m, okay with that, it’s a little bit of a you know a shift in the tradition, but knowing that his parents still have the goats head on the table, I’m good just knowing that someone out there has a goats head on their table and they are perhaps thinking about us. Its pretty umm, for me, especially as I grow older and as my kids grow older, its a really nice tradition, so I think that for them, knowing that we’re doing it, that their grandparents did it and are doing it, that their aunts and uncles are doing it, that so many other people in the world are putting this good energy into the world for a New Year thats full of blessings and full of all good things, makes them feel really connected and really proud of their Jewish practice.
  • Yeah and I started keeping kosher when I was in graduate school, actually when I was living in India umm and so for me it was kind of more my own personal and Jewish evolution. I think that when I knew that I was going to become a Rabbi, I kind of wanted to have more experience with Judaism but it was so meaningful for me that a lot of it stuck. So fortunately my family has been lovely and embracing and enthusiastic about the way we live our lives and they’re pretty committed Jews themselves so yeah it works out pretty nicely. 

ANALYSIS:

Occasionally when people are married, they adopt their loved one’s religion, traditions, beliefs or customs. I found this piece particularly interesting because upon becoming closer to her significant other, the informant was able to learn and expand on her knowledge of her own religion. I also found it intriguing that they were able to take his customs and transform them within their family to create their own new traditions.

Bulgarian Name Day

Nationality: Bulgarian
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Chicagp
Performance Date: 4/3/16
Primary Language: English
Language: Bulgarian
The informant is a 20 year old male who moved from Bulgaria to Chicago as a child. He tells me about a name day tradition that he continues to celebrate even living in the US, and how he feels it’s an important part of his culture and life.
Name day is a celebration for your name and is celebrated just like a birthday. Mine is January 7th because it correlated with my name. Name days comes from the Orthodox Christian religion and its saints. The Orthodox calendar is full of days devoted to different saints. In the past, when Christianity was establishing itself as a main religion in Bulgaria, people began giving their children the same names as the saints from this calendar. People believed that the child named after a certain saint will be looked after and blessed by him/her. Over time, people started celebrating the day kind of like a birthday!I learned about it through my family and it has been a tradition to celebrate it every year, even though we have stopped following many other traditions since we moved from Bulgaria to the US. My family celebrates it by giving decently small gifts or money to the person who’s name were celebrating, and in return the person either buys cake or prepares dinner. Other families go out to restaurants or bars but my family prefers to keep it intimate. Not every name has a date for celebration, only certain common slavic names like mine; Ivan. Celebrating means a lot to my family and we continue to do it every year because it makes us proud to follow traditions from the country were from (Bulgaria).
ANALYSIS:
The informant spoke about these name days as if it were a second birthday. He explained that as a kid he would look forward to it just as much as he would his actual birthday and received gifts and attention all the same. I found this piece interesting because I have really never heard of people having a special day like this each year besides a birthday. It is very common for people to celebrate different days and occasions of coming of age, but this seems to be considered just as important as a birthday each year. I also think that having a whole day dedicated to you because of your name might offer an extra sense of pride and connection for people to their names.