Shavuot Is One of the Three Pilgrimage Festivals in the Jewish Calendar, The

Shavuot is one of the three pilgrimage festivals in the Jewish calendar, the times of the year when people from throughout ancient Israel brought offerings to the Temple in Jerusalem. The others, Sukkot and Pesah, are better known, last longer (a week for each) and have many ritual and celebratory features (for example: the sukkah itself and the lulav and etrog for Sukkot; on Passover, the seder and the eating of matzah and no hametz). By contrast, Shavuot is observed for only one day in liberal congregations and, while it is traditional to eat dairy foods such as blintzes and cheesecake on this festival, relatively few people even know about it to do so. And yet, Shavuot is in fact a major holiday of the Jewish calendar. So, we are making a big deal of it here. � Shavuot has at least five names, each with its own theme. Hag HaBikurim, the festival of the first fruits, and Hag HaKatzir, the festival of the spring harvest, both celebrate the agricultural aspect of this pilgrimage holiday and its ties to the land of Israel. The names, the Feast of Weeks (called Pentecost in Christian literature) and Atzeret, “conclusion,” relate to the seven weeks from the second day of Passover, when we begin to count the Omer (a sacrifice containing an omer-measure of barley, to be offered in the Temple in Jerusalem), to the day before an offering of wheat was brought to the Temple on Shavuot. The title for the Hag that remains most relevant for modern liberal Jews is Z’man Matan Torateinu – the time of the giving of the Torah (on Mt. Sinai). In calling Shavuot Atzeret, making it the conclusion of Pesah, the holiday that celebrates the freedom of our people from Egyptian slavery, and thus connecting it to Z’man Matan Torateinu, the time of the giving of the Torah, the Rabbis of the Mishnah asserted that true freedom is confirmed by the acceptance of responsibility through Torah, the Jewish people’s religious legal document. This exhibit illustrates each of these themes as well as another feature of the festival: the reading of the Book of Ruth. Ruth is one of the five megillot (scrolls) in Ketuvim, the third section of the Bible. (The others are Shir HaShirim/Song of Songs, which is read from the beginning of Pesah until the end of the counting of the Omer; Eikhah/ Lamentations, read on Tisha B’Av; Kohelet/Ecclesiastes, read on Sukkot; and Megillat Esther/the Book of Esther, read on Purim.) The Rabbis chose the Book of Ruth for Shavuot because it offers a personal counterpart to the Israelites’ group acceptance of Torah at Sinai: Ruth’s voluntary choice to be a Jew and live by the faith of our people. And now, the exhibit (currently in the museum case at Temple Sholom of West Essex): Top shelf, left to right: “First Fruits,” oil painting by Reuven Rubin (1893-1974), on three panels painted in Palestine in 1923; today in the Rubin Museum in Tel Aviv. Rubin, a Romanian- born Israeli painter and Israel’s first ambassador to Romania, was a pioneer in the development of a distinctly Israeli style of Jewish art. He studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and also at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and was awarded both the Dizengoff Prize and the Israel Prize. The simplified figures and bright colors in this tryptich, reminiscent of French naifs like Henri Rousseau, share the promise of the “first fruits” in the reborn homeland of the Jewish people. In the panel on the left we see a shepherd playing a halil, a flute-like instrument featured in the folk music of Israel. The mother in the family group in the center panel holds a pomegranate; they are being offered bananas (?) and watermelon by the bare-chested farmer. The kneeling woman is holding an orange from the basket at her feet. A camel driver is taking a nap in the panel on the right, The background of each shows still-barren hills, with a lone young cypress tree (symbol of the Jewish presence in the Land since ancient times) in panel one. The prophet Isaiah says: “I will plant cedars in the wilderness, acacias and myrtles and oleasters; I will set cypresses in the desert, box trees and elms as well”(41:19). Behind the driver in panel three is a sabra cactus; Israeli pioneers came be known as sabras – tough and prickly on the outside and sweet and nourishing within. And, like many olim – immigrants – to Israel, is not native to the soil; the plant was imported to the land 200-300 years ago from Mexico. The “first fruits” of the painting’s tile speak both to the Festival of Shavuot and the early 20th century pioneers of all colors who built up the Land. The next three illustrations are silver objects related to the physical Torah itself. We read the Ten Commandments on Shavuot to recall Z’man Matan Torateinu. The plaque below is a small, freestanding sterling silver display piece given as a gift to confirmands at Temple B’nai Abraham in Newark during the 1950s. The first words of each of the ten commandments are engraved on the front with a dedication to the confirmands on the back. Confirmation in the Reform Movement began in Germany in 1810 under the leadership of Israel Jacobson. For a time, it superceded bar mitzvah for boys and, because in the early years of the Movement girls did not become bat mitvah, served as the “graduation” ceremony for them as well. This traditional silver breastplate, Poland 19th century, was damaged in the Holocaust and rescued during the Communist years. The original Ten Commandments decoration in the center is gone; the pewrer replacement is clearly a misfit. Remarkably, given its history, the breastplate retains a full set of small brass plaques identifying the place in the scroll to which the Torah has been rolled for the Sabbath or festival reading. Displayed here is the plaque for Shavuot. At the top of the Baroque-style breastplate is the depiction of a crown, symbolizing the term Keter Torah - the crown of the Torah, the uppermost of the kabbalistic sephirot of the Tree of Life. Supporting it are lions (of Judah) and columns recalling the central pillars of the Temple in Jerusalem. Heart designs are unusual in Eastern European Judaica. Miniature sterling silver Torah pointers were awarded annually for a number of years by the New Jersey region of the Women of Reform Judaism to honor individual female rabbis, cantors, educators and volunteer leaders. Yad (hand”) is the Hebrew name for this ritual object, often called a pointer in English. The literal depiction of an extended pointer finger, as here, is often its key decorative feature. Some sort of yad is used by every Torah reader to keep track of the place in the not-easy-to- follow handwritten text while protecting the ink and parchment from contamination by human contact. (The zodiac print is just for contrast.) The piece above is part of a decorative art form called “papercuts” (in Hebrew, mig’zarot niyar; in Yiddish, roizeleh; and in German, Scherenschnitte –literally, scissors-cut). There are entire books featuring examples of Jewish-themed papercuts. We know that Ashkenazi Jews in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries practiced papercutting although its origins are unclear. Certainly, Jewish papercuts can be traced to Jewish communities in Syria, Iraq, and North Africa, and the similarity in the cutting techniques (using a knife) between East European Jews and Chinese paper cutters, may indicate that the origin goes back even further. Some contend that Ashkenazi papercutting may date to the 14th century, though its popularity reached a zenith in the 18th and 19th centuries. The first mention of Jewish paper cutting can be found in the treatise "The fight of the pen and the scissors” by a 14th-century rabbi, Shem Tov ben Isaac ben Ardutiel (1290-1369), who describes how he began cutting paper letters when his ink became frozen during a harsh winter. Rabbi Shem Tov is known to Christian Spanish literary history as a courtly Castilian troubadour, Santob de Carrion de los Condes, who composed the Proverbios morales for Pedro the Cruel. Paper cutting became popular in the 19th century with the availability of cheap paper leading to paper cutting becoming widespread among the Jews of Poland and Russia in the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century. Jewish paper cuts were also produced in Germany and probably in the Netherlands. Some Italian Jewish parchment ketubot (marriage contracts) from the late 17th century until the nineteenth century were decorated paper cuts as were some elaborate scrolls of the Book of Esther. Similar papercuts from Jewish communities North Africa and the Middle East have some characteristic style differences. Papercuts were popular among Jews both in eastern and western Europe as well as in Turkey, Morocco, Syria, Bangladesh, Israel, and North America. In recent decades, Jewish paper cuts have again become a popular art form. Papercuts are again often used to decorate ketubot, wedding invitations, and works of art. Yehudit Shadur is an important figure in this effort. The papercut above is part of a subset of papercuts so connected to Shavuot that they got their own name: shavuosl. These relatively small papercuts were displayed against the windowpanes in Jewish homes in a small number of Eastern European communities as beloved (and inexpensive) Shavuot holiday decorations. The very simple late 19th century Polish shavuosl above, a rondel backed with a black paper center, features the Ten Commandments with key Hebrew words of each commandment.

Load more