The Museum of |
Shabbat and the Jewish Holidays |
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By that time we were gone. After the service was over, most people returned home. Some remained to pray all night. It was said that, on Erev Yom Kippur, ghosts wandered around the empty places of prayer. The spirits never frequented places where there were people. However, that didn't faze my friend and cousin Uma. We snuck up to the women's section after the women had gone home and played a trick on them too. The upper part of the body is divine. The lower part of the body is profane. This is the reason that religious Jews, when they pray, wear a sash, or gartl, to separate the sacred from the profane. This is also the reason that the women kept bottles of water with them in the women's section, the vabershe shil. Should a woman break wind or touch some part of her anatomy below the waist, she would symbolically wash her hands by sprinkling a little bit of water over them. Each woman had a bottle of water for that purpose. the women sat on benches. When they went home, they would leave their little bottles of water near their seats. They expected to find them there when they returned the next day for services. We would go up there when they were gone and empty the bottles on the ground. Imagine, the next day, when the women returned to the synagogue. They were rushing down to the water barrel all day. Man! There were a lot of comings and goings and not much praying that day. We only did this on Yom Kippur, when there were lots of women at the synagogue and they stayed there all day. |
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