Translation of an excerpt from Abraham Rechtman, Yidishe Etnografye un Folklor, p. 289-298. Rav Yokhanan had the habit of coming to sit...

From Rabbi Tuvia Gutman- Rappaport, ‘The biography of a generation’, Yizker-bukh Koriv, (1955) p. 674. Beyle Shoyver, who did charitable...

This is one section of a long article by H. Heyoys, published in YIVO's filologishe shriftn in 1928, entitled 'Beliefs and customs in...

This week I've been teaching an online workshop at Yiddish New York about Ashkenazi Jewish women's customs and practices. For the past...

In many shtetlekh (small towns) of Eastern Europe, it was common for the female heads of household to pay feldmesterins to measure the...

According to the feldmesterins observed by S. Weissenberg, cemetery measuring was stepped up after the first selihah, being carried out...

The following text is an excerpt from A.S. Zaks' 'Khoreve Veltn' ­– Ruined Worlds ­– describing Jewish customs in the month of Elul - the...

When I started out researching these practices, I never planned to actually do them. That happened sort of by accident. But in the...

Among the professions listed in this memorial book from Kremenets, Ukraine, between "goose plucker" and "mechanic", is "cemetery zogerke"...

This is an excerpt from the memoirs of Rabbi Tuviah Gutman Rapoport, published in the memorial book of Koriv, Poland Here he remembers...

In the Yizker (memorial) book written by former residents of the shtetl Kletsk, now in Belarus, I found the following short description...

What follows is an excerpt of an ethnographic memoir - Yidishe etnografye un folklor (Jewish ethnography and folklore) – written in 1958...

Yesterday I gave a guest class on the Holocaust for a synagogue I used to work at in London. I showed them lots of examples from my own...

The first time I measured a cemetery, I did it on impulse. I was visiting the shtetl in Lithuania that my family were from and, finding...

According to the ethnographic study I posted recently, Yom Kippur candles made with threads that had been used to measure graves were...

This is a translation of a 1906 German study of Feld (cemetery) and Keywer (grave - from the Hebrew and Yiddish קבֿר) measuring by...

In his memoir Khoreve veltn, written in an effort to preserve in memory the customs of the Jewish shtetlekh of Lithuania destroyed during...

In Yiddish literature, the practices described on this website are often viewed disparagingly, especially when women used to do them for...

From the memorial book of the town of Pruzhany, Poland, recorded by A Fayvushinsky.The text has very little punctuation (I've added a bit...

In kneytlakh-leygn and feldmestn, it seems that it was believed that by laying the candle wicks around the cemetery they would be imbued...