Tekhines

Roger Berkowitz

Sarah Chandler is discovering the ancient Jewish art of measuring graves, or tekhines, and she writes about her visit to Hannah Arendt’s grave at Bard College. 

Scissors, check. Waxed hemp string, check. Printed packet of tekhines (Yiddish prayers), check. I am packing my bag for a pilgrimage upstate with two dear friends. I’ve invited them to accompany me to the cemetery that sits in the center of the campus of Bard College, located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. It is just over 100 miles north of my Brooklyn apartment, but I suspect it will take us at least three hours to get there on a Monday afternoon. I put some coffee in my thermos, pick up a few bagel sandwiches and head to our meeting point. 

It’s a federal holiday, President’s day. I haven’t always desired to spend my holidays in cemeteries. But in recent years, I have been drawn to them as a place of ritual, curiosity and authentic Jewish magic. Though I am not a Yiddish speaker, I’ve carried my great-grandmother Bubbie Sarah’s prayer book of tekhines for more than a decade. I have been curious about these prayers — published in 1910 Vilna, Lithuania, 650 miles northwest of the shtetl where she grew up in Pochiav, Russia in 1895 — and often find myself wondering when she would have acquired this book, since it was in 1906 that she immigrated to the United States and 1911 when she married her first husband. It’s a question, like so many others, that I may never receive clarity on, but I’ll always have the physical object to connect me with my lineage. Today, I pack this sacred object carefully in a plastic bag. We are traveling 100 miles to the grave of Hannah Arendt.

I recently became intrigued with Arendt when a dear friend, Jesse Freedman, began his project of putting on a play of her 1963 book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.” Her writing and her life story struck me as prophetic, her words relevant to the resurgence of antisemitism.