In the 70s and part of the 80s, I spent the Yamim Noraim davening in a small shtiebel on the corner of 38th Street and Fifteenth Avenue. The “shul” was really a large room on the ground floor of a two-story gray building located on a block of what was then considered the outskirts of Boro Park. With its dark wood-paneled walls and faded linoleum, the shtiebel was nondescript, unremarkable.
And yet, more than forty years later, during the Yamim Noraim, my thoughts invariably drift back to that shul.
My family lived on the same tree-lined block as my mother’s mother, “Bubby”—a shortish woman with a sandy-colored wig and dancing brown eyes. We all davened in the same shtiebel, located two short blocks away. But on the Yamim Noraim, Bubby would go early and sit next to her friends. The stylish and elegant, blonde-wigged Mrs. G., a Hungarian woman, would sit to her right, and the gracious Mrs. I., with her dark complexion and short black wig, would be on her left. Wearing freshly starched white aprons over their yom tov attire and white satin tichels (kerchiefs) on top of their wigs, these women occupied the most coveted seats in the women’s section—at a table pushed up against the lace curtain mechitzah.
When I arrived at shul with my mother and older sister, we would find my grandmother, sandwiched between her two dear friends, her petite frame hunched over her machzor as she mouthed silent prayers. Bubby, who spoke a rich, elegant Yiddish, only a sprinkling of which I understood, would glance at us and smile briefly and shift her attention back to the machzor.
The shul had a Chassidic flavor—though most of the congregants were not Chassidic. They were simple, hardworking Jews from the neighboring blocks, men and women who had seen their families, and sometimes their entire towns, disappear in the chimneys of Auschwitz, but who persisted in coming to shul. In those years, Boro Park was saturated with Jews who had numbers on their arms; nearly everyone above a certain age had witnessed the unfathomable and had somehow mustered the strength to marry, have children and start over.
In that tiny shul, the prayers of survivors hung heavy in the air.
My Czech-born Bubby, a survivor of Auschwitz, and her shul friends, who had memories of a vibrant Jewish life in small shtetls that dotted the Hungarian, Czechoslovakian and Romanian countrysides, spent the High Holidays weeping, asking forgiveness from G-d.
They understood the Yamim Noraim in a way that I, as a twelve-year-old, could not.
In that tiny shul, the prayers of survivors hung heavy in the air.
Bubby was a personality—a feisty, energetic woman—a seamstress by profession, with a sharp business mind who played the stock market well. Bubby had a flair for drama, and she would get animated while doling out another piece of advice or recounting yet another story from the “alte heim.”
But on the Yamim Noraim, Bubby had no stories to share, no wise words to impart. She sat erect by the lace curtain mechitzah, quiet, contemplative. She would adjust the white kerchief on her head and press her finger against her lips, gently reminding me that today no mundane words would come from her mouth. She had the custom of maintaining a ta’anis dibbur, abstaining from idle chatter on these holy days.
On Rosh Hashanah, in the moments preceding shofar blowing, the women’s section would swell with young mothers in yom tov finery, toddlers squirming in their arms as the women searched for seats. Invariably, some of the crowd would spill onto the sidewalk, and the front metal door would be propped open for all to hear. A hush would descend on the crowd. Then the shofar would be blown—ten, twenty, thirty times. When the blasts were over, the mothers would gather their children, who were beginning to whine, and leave in a flutter of noise.
My grandmother and her friends would glance at the impatient toddlers, unfazed by the whining. These women, who once had no hope and no future, understood that children represented both.
Bubby has been gone for several years, but I was reminded of this childhood memory recently. While reading the Mesoras HaRav Yom Kippur Machzor, I came across Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s recollection of the Yamim Noraim of generations past:
To recount what Jews of earlier generations—not only the gedolei Yisrael but Jews in general—experienced on the Yamim Nora’im—the yearning, the nostalgia that overtook one’s entire being—to impart that emotion is almost impossible.
Reading the words of the Rav, I felt a pang of longing—and, at the same time, a deep familiarity. I knew the Jews he was talking about.
As a twelve-year-old girl, I had davened with them in a shtiebel on Fifteenth Avenue.
Adina Sapir is a freelance writer living in New York.