Sitting Shiva, Showing Home Movies and Other Tips

I'm almost finished sitting shiva for my brother. Just over two hours left. Soon I'll change out of  my shiva "outfit," the same clothes I've been wearing since leaving for his funeral. Except for Shabbat, I've been wearing the very same outer clothes, skirt and two-layer top. The outer shirt was ripped at the funeral in one of the Jewish customs.

When we sit shiva, weeklong Jewish mourning, one is supposed to ignore the usual dressing and grooming care. No hairbrushing or clean clothes. Also no bathing. Yes for sure, I'm looking forward to taking a shower, shampoo and putting on something clean!

The night before my brother's funeral I was at my New York daughter's, and she took out a set of DVDs that my brother had made from our old home movies. We watched a couple of hours worth. She gave me the package, and I took them home. Yesterday I decided to put them on to watch and turned off the sound. The sound was just some musical accompaniment the "film to DVD" place had added. In the 1950's and early sixties, home movies were silent.

So, in addition to the little album my eldest daughter had made before I left Israel for the funeral, I now had moving pictures of my brother and our family life way back when to show those who came to לנחם linachem, comfort me. These family movies were from about 1956-1960, if I'm not mistaken. There are additional DVDs that follow my parents and us well into the early 1980s when we moved to Shiloh.

Here I am riding my bicycle near our last* Bell Park Gardens, Bayside, NY apartment, 67-62 Springfield Blvd.

I moved the low chair I had been sitting in to a place I could also see the screen, and I'd talk about my brother and the world in which we grew up.

One advantage of showing the home movies over the picture album, which people continued to look at especially since it included photos from his entire life up to a few weeks before my brother died, was because pretty much everyone in the room could see it at once.

Few of those who came had any real idea of what it was like in a place like Bell Park Gardens, which was such an important formative part of our childhood. My brother was ten when we moved to Great Neck. Seeing us and it, in faded color, brought my stories to life far superior to even the most descriptive words.

And for me it was very meaningful and comforting to see my family, parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, friends and the locations which loved and shaped us all.

*We lived in three different apartments in Bell Park Gardens from December 1949- August 1962.

On My Mother's Yartzeit

As per Jewish custom, I have a 24 hour light burning in her memory.

I have no set custom as to what to do on these memorial days for her. When my husband has them for his parents, he brings herring and maybe schnapps to synagogue in the morning to make a "Lechaim," in their memory. But even though I do pray the morning (and also afternoon) prayers, I do it all quietly alone at home or wherever I happen to be.

I don't really do anything special to commemorate my mother, and I'm still in the first year of mourning for my father, who passed away just a few days before Passover.

In a sense my whole life is a reflection on my parents, for good and for bad. We all are the results of how we are raised and what we make of it.

Even though both of my parents ended up extremely dependent in the period before they died, I still think of them as a generation of giants. There's nothing I can do or accomplish that can compete with the powers they had. We were taught to treat them with awe and respect. And from what I understand, their parent, too treated them that way. They were the "American generation," the first in their families to be born and raised in America. They paved the way. They were also very strong and influential grandparents, in a way I can never be. And in a sense I wouldn't want to be, since I had to stand aside when my parents (and in-laws, too) visited and were with my children.

My mother always encouraged my love for dance, and there was a summer, when I was twenty, when we actually worked together teaching an exercise class for women. Other women in a nearby community had requested that she give a summer class. I had just taken two years of "Dance Movement" lessons with an excellent, innovative instructor, Allan Wayne, in Manhattan, so she told them that she needed me to demonstrate the movements.

Basically, the truth is that I was the teacher. My mother would point to me and tell the women in the class to "follow" what I was doing.

And in many ways, after the original shock of hearing that I was going to live a Torah aka Orthodox Jewish Life and then move to Israel, she became quite supportive. And as the Great Neck Synagogue became more of an Orthodox community, she enthusiastically joined in the various chesed activities like comforting and bringing food to mourners besides running the Sisterhood Gift Shop and more.

My mother loved and participated in all of the arts, was a paid member of lots of museums, a docent in the nearby Nassau County Museum, performed and was stage manager in the Fresh Meadows and later the Great Neck Community Theater, loved dance and shows etc. She also tried her hand at painting. And she absolutely adored her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

לעילוי נשמתה

שפרה בת אברהם וחיה ריזיה

Kiddie City Memories

For many of us who grew up in Northeastern Queens, NY, in the 1950's and early 1960's  Kiddy City amusement park was a favorite place to be. There were all sorts of rides and treats from simple merry go rounds to bumper cars to spinning cups, roller coasters and more frightening rides in which we were strapped in tightly. 

I am not quite sure when it closed down, but every time I pass its location, on the LIRR Northern Line after Bayside going east, I think of all the fun I used to have there.