MAY THE HOLY SOULS AWAKEN FROM THEIR GRAVES AND PRAY FOR US
Ashkenazi practices of Ancestral Connection with Kohenet Annie (Annabel) Gottfried Cohen — Tuesdays, 3-4:30 pm ET / 12-1:1:30 pm PT, October 21, 28, November 4, 11, 18, 25
In this six-session course, Kohenet Annie (Annabel) Gottfried Cohen will guide you through an exploration of various Ashkenazi Jewish customs that involved talking directly to and even calling on the dead. Through English translations of Yiddish texts, we will learn about geyn af keyver oves (visiting ancestral graves), raysn kvorim (wailing over or literally 'tearing' graves), klogenishn (lamentations), feldmestn (cemetery measuring) and kneytlekh-leygn (soul candle making). We will also learn about the professional "cemetery women" who were paid to lead these customs in many communities. Contrary to the almost axiomatic idea that magical practices declined with modernity, all of these customs survived well into the twentieth century, and were practiced by many of our ancestors just a hundred years ago.
Asking ourselves the questions "when did Ashkenazi Jews stop talking to the dead?" and "why?", we will also talk a bit about the history of the Eastern European Jewish enlightenment (haskole), and the huge changes and challenges facing Eastern European Jewish communities in the decades before the Holocaust. Finally, we will look at some of the ways these customs are being revived today. We will study tkhines (yiddish prayers), like the one quoted in the title of this course, and sprokhn (incantations) that called on deceased ancestors for help, and use them to write our own prayers and incantations.
This course will be taught via Zoom and can also be accessed via phone. All sessions will be recorded, allowing you to engage with the material even if you’re unable to attend live. For financial assistance and scholarship opportunities, please contact liviah@beitkohenet.org.
Cost: $250 + $25 non-refundable registration fee
Kohenet Annie (Annabel) Gottfried Cohen
Kohenet Annie (Annabel) Gottfried Cohen is a researcher, writer, translator and teacher, currently undertaking a PhD Modern Jewish History at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. She lives in France, where she is researching Jewish anti-fascist resistance before and during WW2. Annie teaches Yiddish at the Sorbonne University, and online with the Workers’ Circle. She has previously taught at YIVO, KlezKanada, Yiddish Summer Weimar, and the London based radical language school Babel’s Blessing. She is a 2023-2024 Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow, for which she is translating the memoirs of Jewish Communist journalist and activist Gina Medem.
Annie researches and translates materials relating to Jewish women’s religiosity in Eastern Europe, publishing her work on a blog: www.pullingatthreads.com. Her essays on this work have been published in Yiddish and English in the Forward, Vashti, and Strange Fire: Jewish Voices from the Pandemic (2021). She has taught on the subject at JTS, Yale, Wheaton College, Georgetown University, City College New York, Yiddish New York and Yiddish Summer Weimar.