Author: Annie Cohen

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.