Author: Annabel Gottfried Cohen

Categories
The Pickle

The great Yom Kippur chicken revolt

A painting of chickens that appeared in Oliver Goldsmith’s A History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1820). Credit: Public domain
A painting of chickens that appeared in Oliver Goldsmith’s A History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1820). Credit: Public domain

For everything there is a season, and every season comes to an end.

Categories
Essay Jewish Culture The Jewish Left

The forgotten women’s rituals of Yom Kippur

Three women holding a length of string in a Jewish cemetery, practising feldmestn
Three women presumed to be feldmesterins. Image taken from S. Weissenberg, Neue Folge, (1906), pp.39-45.

Cemetery- and grave-measuring were part of the female clerical role in Ashkenazi Jewish life, and powerful tools of ancestral connection.