Skip to main content.
Bard HAC
Bard HAC
  • About sub-menuAbout
    Hannah Arendt

    “There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.”

    Join HAC
    • About the HAC
      • About Hannah Arendt
      • Book Roger
      • Our Team
      • Our Location
  • Programs sub-menuPrograms
    Hannah Arendt
    • Our Programs
    • Courage to Be
    • Democracy Innovation Hub
    • Virtual Reading Group
    • Dialogue Groups
    • HA Personal Library
    • Affiliated Programs
    • Hannah Arendt Humanities Network
    • Meanings of October 27th
    • Lapham's Quarterly
  • Academics sub-menuAcademics
    Hannah Arendt

    “Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”

    • Academics at HAC
    • Undergraduate Courses
  • Fellowships sub-menuFellowships
    HAC Fellows

    “Action without a name, a 'who' attached to it, is meaningless.”

    • Fellowships
    • Senior Fellows
    • Associate Fellows
    • Student Fellowships
  • Conferences sub-menuConferences
    JOY: Loving the World in Dark Times Conference poster

    Fall Conference 2025
    “JOY: Loving the World in Dark Times”

    October 16 – 17

    Read More Here
    • Conferences
    • Past Conferences
    • Registration
    • Our Location
    • De Gruyter-Arendt Center Lecture in Political Thinking
  • Publications sub-menuPublications
    Hannah Arendt
    Subscribe to Amor Mundi

    “I've begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world ... Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories Amor Mundi.”

    • Publications
    • Amor Mundi
    • Quote of the Week
    • HA Yearbook
    • Podcast: Reading Hannah Arendt
    • Further Reading
    • Video Gallery
    • From Our Members
  • Events sub-menuEvents
    Hannah Arendt

    “It is, in fact, far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.”

    —Hannah Arendt
    • HAC Events
    • Upcoming
    • Archive
    • JOY: Loving the World in Dark Times Conference
    • Bill Mullen Recitation Prize
  • Join sub-menu Join HAC
    Hannah Arendt

    “Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.”

    • Join HAC
    • Become a Member
    • Subscribe
    • Join HAC
               
  • Search

Amor Mundi

Amor Mundi Home

 

Tekhines

03-31-2024

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.

Footer Contact
Contact HAC
Bard College
PO Box 5000
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504
845-758-7878
[email protected]
Join the HAC
Become a Member
Subscribe to Amor Mundi
Join the Virtual Reading Group
Follow Us
Image for Twitter
Image for Facebook
Image for YouTube
Image for Instagram