Brukhe Feldman recalls an interesting custom associated with mourning the dead. Brukhe was born in 1938 in Bershad, Ukraine. She discusses the ritual of shive (shivah), a period of seven days in which a mourner is prohibited from washing, wearing shoes, studying Torah, or having marital relations. The mourner typically sits on the floor or on low stools during this time. Brukhe remembers that in her community, shivah was observed for eight days, which was relatively common in Eastern Europe, rather than the more universal seven days (shivah means seven in Hebrew).
In this clip, recorded in Bershad in 2008, Brukhe discusses a custom associated with the shoes of the person who has passed away. Any shoes that the deceased had worn are burned, while new shoes that were in his or her possession may be given away. Brukhe remembers hearing that the reason for burning the shoes is to avoid "stepping" on the corpse by stepping into his or her shoes.
Etia Shvartzbroit was born in Mohyliv Podilskyi in 1928. She comes from a religious family -- her grandfather was a Rabbi, and her parents kept a kosher household. Her family was quite wealthy -- they kept two servants and donated generously to the poor. Her mother, however, had trouble having children. When Etia was finally born after 13 years of trying, her mother wanted to make sure that she would grow up healthy.
Lutsk, 2003
Etia was, unfortunately, a sickly child -- she had whooping cough and was not responding to treatment. When the cough returned after a treatment with a doctor in Odessa, her parents turned to folk remedies. First, her father attempted to ward off the illness by "giving it away" to various streams in the town. When that did not help, her mother "sold" the child to a widow with many children who was so poor that bad luck (and thus, sickness) would stay away from her.
Sonia (Sure) Litvak was born in Zvil (Novohrad-Volynskyi), Ukraine in 1925. AHEYM interviewed her in Rivne, Ukraine, in 2003. Sonia was discussing the extreme poverty during the Great Famine (Holodomor) in Ukraine, 1932-1933. She explained that despite the terrible conditions, no one in her family died from the hunger, because her grandmother had managed to save some money for the family.
Sonia's grandmother was a "bube," a kind of midwife and folk healer in Zvil. It is interesting to note that this profession was sufficiently lucrative for her to be able to save up a significant amount of money, enough to sustain the family in years to come. The story Sonia tells in the clip took place in 1918, during the Russian Civil War. Sonia's grandmother had hidden her savings in a fur coat. A "Denikinovets," a soldier from the army of Anton Denikin, entered the house and tried to take the coat. When the grandmother resisted, she was beaten, and she died two days later.
General Denikin was commander of the Volunteer Army, one of the many factions fighting for control of Ukraine during the Civil War that broke out in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Volunteer Army, commonly known as the Whites, was made up mostly of conservative officers from the tsarist army. They opposed the Red Army's efforts to extend the Revolution and fought for the maintenance of the rights of property owners and priests. During the battles, attacks on the Jews, among other minorities, were quite common. One survey counted 688 cities, towns and villages affected by pogroms. Many of these locales suffered multiple pogroms, as armies and brigands came and went. The pogroms were attributed most often to Ukrainian nationalists, though the White Volunteer Army is said to have been responsible for about twenty percent of the attacks, with Sonia's grandmother being one example of the latter.
Because of the grandmother's bravery, Sonia's family kept the hidden money and used it to survive the Famine.
We return this week to Bella Chirkova from Vinnitsa, who speaks this time about folk remedies. When asked if she knows how to ward off the evil eye, she begins by saying that she can tell what's wrong with a person by using an egg. (See also this post about using eggs in folk remedies.) She then gives an example of one way a person can be healed without conventional medicine -- Bella suggests drinking your own urine to cure a cough.
The suggested treatment is but one example of what is known as "babske refues" -- or old wives' medicine. As Lisa Epstein notes in the YIVO encyclopedia, "The approach of the East European Jewish population to health care made no distinction between what would now be considered “scientific” medicine and “folk” medicine.... Among Jews, a rich oral tradition of folk remedies for physical, as well as emotional, ills existed." The cures could be found in various recipe books, but by the time Bella was learning them, they were primarily transmitted orally, from one woman to another.
"Incantations must not be taught to anyone," writes Avraham Rechtman in his 1958 book Yidishe Etnografie un Folklor (Jewish Ethnography and Folklore). During an expedition to Tomashpol (a shtetl in the Podolia region of Ukraine) in 2003, AHEYM met Liza Petrunenko, who believed in this rule of silence. Although she knew the formulas that one must say in order to ward off the Evil Eye, she refused to tell the interviewers. However, she did agree to demonstrate the procedure of "rolling an egg", which is done to dispel fear.
After a careful examination of a number of Jewish sources, I could not find any direct references to rolling eggs, though I did learn that eggs were used for other purposes in Jewish folk customs; for instance, the Talmud mentions eggs being used for divination (Sanhedrin 101a). I did find, however, an almost exact description of the procedure Liza performs on Dov-Ber on a website about remedies to ward off the Evil Eye among Mexicans and Latin Americans.
Scholars have proposed that the Evil Eye, as a folkloric and cultural symbol, originates in ancient Sumer and is present to this day in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim folk beliefs. The remedy of using an egg in the way we see above is most likely a fairly old practice and was probably brought over to Mexico by European settlers.
In Jewish custom, the Evil Eye is mentioned as far back as Proverbs in Tanakh (see, for instance, 23:6 and 28:22), and many preventative and curative measures for it exist, including spitting and incantations (mentioned in the video). Folklorist Dov Noy writes that "Although practices of this kind were disapproved of by rabbinic authorities... they persisted... In the Middle Ages there is evidence of a more widespread use of folk medicine among Jews. There are many folk prescriptions in the Sefer Hasidim (13th century), most of them derived from the contiguous Christian culture" (Encyclopaedia Judaica, Second Edition).
How does your family ward off the Evil Eye? Have you ever seen someone "roll out an egg"? Let us know with your comments below!
