9 Traditional Jewish Stories from Boro Park

Brises, Funerals, Weddings and other Secret Rites

I never saw a circumcision taking place. I never attended a funeral. I never went to a wedding. Well, eventually I did go to the last two, but only long after I was grown up and then very rarely throughout my life. These celebratory rituals are among the secrets of the religion into to which I was born a very long time ago.

I remember going to my grandparents’ house on Mina Street when a boy cousin was born and was told it was a bris. What that meant I didn’t find out for many years. My parents took me and they joined other relatives in the kitchen until the whole room was crowded. Then everyone became silent for a moment while the rabbi went into a back bedroom and my father and his brothers and brothers-in-law went in and shut the door. As soon as they were gone, my mother, her aunts and sisters-in-law, along with a few other children like me, talked, ate tidbits (for instance, hard-boiled eggs, small slices of bagels known as “benches”, and oatmeal cookies) and drank glasses of seltzer with flavours from jars of jam. After about fifteen minutes, the men came back in, and my Uncle Joe was holding something on a pillow wrapped in a blue blanket, and this something I was told was my new boy cousin. As soon as the men came back, there was a moment of silence, until everyone started to shout Mazel Tov  and Congratulations! and We have a new little Jew in the family! The men drank whisky from little glasses and they clinked each other and shouted: Another Jew added to the world! What happened in that back bedroom, however, was not explained to me. Another cousin, yet still younger than I, whispered: “They chop off his sisser.” Of course, in later years I was able to read about the ceremony and its religious significance, but there was never an occasion for me to view, as an adult, the operation whether performed by a moyle or a surgeon.

Funerals were also strictly off-limits for children under thirteen and sometimes beyond to sixteen or seventeen. They should at no time see or touch the corpse, should not accompany the funeral cortege of limousines past the gates of the cemetery, or watch the dead body lowered into the grave or help with throwing clods of dirt, rocks or flowers into the hole in the ground. Very young children and infants stayed at home with a baby-sitter or some adult too old, tired or sick to shlep to the cemetery.

However, since a funeral has several component parts, there were some aspects of the farewelling of the dead which children could observe if not participate in. Once the body of the person who used to be alive was removed from the home, put in the care of the chevra kadosha for washing and dressing, the burial in a shroud occurred in a cemetery, the family washed their hands and returned home to sit shiva for seven days. At this time, youngsters were taken to the house or apartment of the mourners and passed through the room where the grieving family sat on low benches and greeted each new arrival with tears, hugging and a moment of laughter when the departed’s favourite jokes were told. The children could be hugged, pinched and tickled for a few moments but then we were ushered into the kitchen where there lots of snacks and drinks to keep us busy for the hour or so while our parents consoled the grieving survivors.

Boys and girls might also stand or play outside the synagogue when grown-ups went in to say the kaddish for the departed and, if they wished, go up close to the door, and listen to the collected group saying yizkor together. During the first week of mourning, if a child was the son or daughter of the deceased, playing games that involved a lot of noise and racing around were discouraged; but thereafter, they were free to join with the other kids and be as hysterical as they wanted.

It was not, however, explained that so and so—grandparent, aunt, close friend of the family—was dead, gone to heaven or passed into a better life beyond. Nobody whispered: They have gone to sleep forever. Adults would say: Uncle this or Aunt that or cousin whatever was now just a memory. We are very sad but that is God’s will, or, It’s just the way it is. Modern parents added: When they put the body in the ground, it will fertilize the soil and grass, plants and flowers will grow on this spot. None of the children, as I recall, ever asked for a further explanation. We accepted mysteries as just that, mysteries of life.

But weddings, let me tell you, that is a completely other story. Grown-up people got married, we were told, so that they could become mommies and daddies. The bride and the groom were grown up, far too grown up for us to understand anything about them, and we could barely see the difference when they gathered in clumps, all dressed up in their fancy clothes, hugging and smooching together, between the happy couple, their parents, grandparents and other big cousins, uncles and aunts and very very old people. When we went to a wedding, we also got dressed up in our best clothes; usually this happened  just before we had to go out the door and get into a car or taxi because you couldn’t trust us to keep our shoes clean, our pants and shorts from being torn, and our hair from messing up. When we got to the wedding place, if we wanted, we could go into the special room where the rabbi made the bride and the groom a married couple, a wife and a husband, as they stood under the houpa and recited prayers; otherwise we could go into different big room for playing in, or if it weren’t raining, we could go outside in the garden to run around and scream all we wanted. After the ceremony, everybody came out in a great rush and went into the dining hall, shaking hands, slapping each other on the back, and crying out “Mazel tov!” “Congratulations!” and “Hooray, there will be more Jews in the world!”

As for weddings during the rest of my life, since hardly any of our friends’ children tied the knot formally and with ceremonies, so we hardly ever went to one. But even back in the olden times in Boro Park, when we were not old enough to attend—or to have our one age cohort approach the hoopa—it was a mystery of how two people that had been just grown-up kids became a couple that would become a mother and a father and then have babies.

Instead of this being forever and ever and until death do ye part, there was a certain way called—no, not called but whispered—to separate them called a divorce. Then the couple were not a couple, even though they might still be a mother and a father. It happened in a less festive time, place and attitude.

What I could see, in a sort of a way, was the gathering of women in our kitchen and then the arrival of some grown-up woman—at that time everyone over fifteen was an adult to me, and there seemed no difference between ages except in the style of clothes, of which I was not very aware. When a woman like that arrived, three things happened: first, everything went silent; second, I was told to go away; and third, they all went upstairs for a few hours.  Through certain not very obvious hints and comments made subsequently and over the next few years with a growing glimmer of understanding of what the grown-up world was all about, I learned (perhaps much too grandiose word to use here: I guessed or made-up) that these were wives on the verge of divorce.

As far as I could gather, a divorce was a very shameful thing, the reverse of a wedding, and something to be hidden from children like myself. In some cases, the gathering of my mother’s closest, most intimate gossiping and mah-jong-playing friends, embraced the young (to them maybe) woman because she was the victim of something her husband said or did, so that she was being cast out into the wilderness where only a cluster of sympathetic women could protect her and guide her into whatever would be the next stage of her life. However, even if this were the situation, the protectors also attempted, if the fatal step had not been taken, “to save the marriage”, that is, to preserve the young woman from social opprobrium. No one said “Mazel tov!” or “Congratulations!” They shook their heads and said “Tsk, tsk, tsk” or “Oy givalt!” “What a business!”

The gathering in our kitchen, after they came downstairs again, would try to make her “give him another chance” and to swallow her pride and to think of the rest of the family and so on. In the other case, though, where the woman was blamed for initiating the divorce by “defiling” the marriage vow by “promiscuity” or “walking out on the man” or failing to give him “his due”, they would lean in on her, try to talk her out of the decision, or signal that she would no longer be welcome in their company. Tsk, task, tsk. A  real shanda! What a thing to happen to the Jews!

Please understand that at that time I could not have expressed myself on these secret matters in such mature and sophisticated terms and had only the most vague and skewered sense of the term “understanding”. In brief, I didn’t know what they were talking about. How could I, since I really had no idea of what marriage meant or what obligated the husband and wife to do something and not to do something else, for and with each other.  The only possible example of a marriage that I was familiar with, the union of my father and mother, and that was something eternally fixed in the universe from the beginning of time, which was when I was born; in other words, my father and mother were (a) always together, (b) always adults, and (c) always concerned with home-making and income-earning.

Though I knew in a few years that my sister was born and she entered the family as a baby, which changed my relations to my parents, other visitors to the house, and kids on the street, I could not imagine there was ever a time when I did not exist for my father and mother, just as I did for myself. So how could I have known what a young man and a young woman did when they got married to have children and make a family or what it meant for such a couple to separate, all this was even more mysterious, let alone what happened behind closed doors when the rabbi c hopped off some boy baby’s sisser.

The special secret session of the women and the potential or actual divorcee seemed to involve a lot of silent and loud crying and drinking of many cups of coffee, and also the eating of a lot of cake brought into the house from the visitors. That it was a religious occasion was indicated by the lowering of voices and the switch from English to Yiddish. This happened at other events or when my parents wished to discuss things they didn’t want me to hear about.

For this reason alone, it was my firm belief that religion was a secret affair and that someone had to be grown-up enough to understand its mysteries, mysteries that had nothing to do with how the world was created or what happened to make it what it was today—divided into the people you could trust and those who were out to kill you, like the Cossacks or the Nazis, filled with things such as machines and institutions that made no sense at all except that they were there and you shouldn’t get mixed up with them—but only with what happened inside the Jewish community, the family and then rooms and times when little kids could not be allowed. If I ever asked somebody, like a grandma, what do we believe in—that is, what should I have faith and trust in—she would say, “Don’t worry, when they throw you in the ovens, they don’t give you a test!” Yet even that made no sense. Tsk, tsk,tsk!