When I was growing up, my family’s Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur scenarios never varied. You would find us in the Litowisker Shul on the lower East Side, my mother and I seated in the very front row in the center aisle next to my grandmother. Diagonally across from us in the row on the left sat my Tanta Rifka whose hats I then found quite amusing, but now would be considered the height of fashion. The Rebbetzin, a tiny wizened woman always dressed in black, constantly jumped up from her seat to the right of us, to wish each woman and child a gut yur in original and elaborate Yiddish rhymes. By the time I came to shul in my brand new Yom Tov outfit, about two hours after my mother had arrived, everyone was in his or her place. No matter the year, it was always the same. I thought it always would be.
The Litowisker was a unique and colorful shul, blocks and worlds apart from the Modern Orthodox Young Israel that I began to frequent in my late teen years, or the smaller Mizrachi Shul that my married sister and her family attended. In the Litowisker on Delancey Street, there was no fancy wooden or carved mechitzah. Instead, the women sat behind a heavy cotton curtain stitched onto steel rods which separated us from the men. For all I knew, my father and brother could have been on another planet. I would only see them later at the break. If I ever dared to slide the fabric of the mechitzah even one tiny inch off of its track, my grandmother would immediately and vehemently return the divider to its place and stare reproachfully at me, her errant granddaughter. I got the same look if I played with my hair or accidentally touched my shoe at any point during the day. If that happened, then my Bobba as she was known, would make me pour some water from a small bottle that she kept near her seat and wet my hands to purify them. She also controlled the access to smelling salts to sniff on Yom Kippur if we were feeling weak. Just one whiff of whatever was in that strange little bottle that was passed around was guaranteed to wake anyone from their stupor. Strangely, our Shul was also graced with spittoons located strategically around the room. Above these receptacles were Yiddish signs which stated,” Here, it is absolutely forbidden to spit on the floor.” It should come as no surprise, though, that in all of my years spent in there, that I never saw anyone use these containers. The signs were just part of the general ambiance.
While there seemed to be rules about spitting and mechitzah touching, it seemed that the Litowisker crowd did not waste time worrying about the possibility of fire hazards or flammability. I fondly remember dancing on Simchat Torah (finally in the men’s section) gleefully waving a flag topped with a lit candle placed precariously inside a scooped out apple. Not as amusing were the long afternoon breaks on Rosh Hashanah when the Rabbi and the Chazzan went to the mikvah across the bridge in Williamsburg and the congregants hung around drinking coffee in yahrzeit glasses laced with cubes of sugar while they waited and waited. That could be why Rosh Hashanah davening never ended before four p.m. I never had the patience to sit in shul that long especially since much of what the Chazzan said was indecipherable to me. lnstead, I chose to finish davening and wait for my parents and older siblings at home. After all, someone had to put the food on the blech or in later years, take charge of my nieces or later my own children.
Mostly, though, my clearest and most nostalgic memories are about how the Litowisker ladies cried. I’ve really never experienced this in any of the subsequent places where I’ve davened, but on the Yomim Noraim, these women wept aloud through most of the davening though most of them probably did not understand the Hebrew words that they were reading. From an adult perspective, I realize that these women understood what they were saying well enough. Most adults of that generation experienced difficult lives, so they clearly comprehended that these holy days were times of judgment. They knew that their lives and those of their families depended on their communication with the Eibishter, The Almighty. And so they cried.
After the fast, on that last Yom Kippur, my mother also sounded close to tears. We had not joined her that year because of our busy work and family schedules. It had been easier to stay at home and attend the shul in our own neighborhood. When I called that night, she mentioned sadly that that she hadn’t sat in her regular seat all of that day. A stranger had been sitting in my mother’s place when my mom arrived in shul and she didn’t want to embarrass the newcomer. My Bobba and Tanta Rifka and even the Rebbetzin were by now long gone and my father was behind the curtain. No one realized that my mother had been displaced. Momma told me that on that long day, seated on a folding chair in the back of the room, she had felt estranged, like she didn’t belong. “It was hard for me to concentrate,” she confided. “I can’t explain it,” she continued. “I felt like I was left out, somehow. It didn’t feel like the regular davening.” It wasn’t like my mother to get so upset over a seat.
Sadly, the New Year brought other changes. Three months after Yom Kippur, my mother succumbed to a stroke and was laid to rest near her old shul friends and family in the Litowisker section of the Beth David Cemetery. We never spent another Yom Tov in that shul. Yet, every year at this time I think about how I would love to go back to the Litowisker just once more; to go back in time to when I was young and so innocent. How wonderful it would be to sit up front again with my mom, peek at my dad and brother through the mechitzah, while all around me the ladies begged and cried for a happy and healthy new year.
Estelle Glass, a Teaneck resident, is a retired educator who is now happily writing her own essays.
By Estelle Glass
