Author Archives: rachelmankowitz

My Israel Trip: Shabbat in Israel

Posted on December 13, 2025 by rachelmankowitz

            Friday morning, day four of my trip to Israel, I woke up to my friend’s son practicing guitar and singing This Land Was Made for You and Me, because he’s been taking guitar lessons from a relative in the States. His other practice song was Skip to my Lou, and I’m pretty sure I have the same guitar book somewhere.

            It was already drizzling, which just reinforced the plan to stay close to home for the day. Our first plan was to go to a local ceremony naming a path in the city after a fallen soldier, but when we got to the school building where the ceremony was taking place, the crowd had already overflowed out of the auditorium, into the lobby and beyond. Reassured that the family would feel the community’s support, we sent our best wishes through neighbors, and walked back to the car, and on the way back across Modiin, my friend showed me the black fabric covering a new street sign that would tell the young man’s story. A large number of the young people in Modiin had served in the army during this war, either as regular army or in reserves, so these ceremonies were, unfortunately, not uncommon.

            One of the first things I’d mentioned to my friend when we started planning this trip, was that I wanted to go to a real Israeli supermarket at some point, so after we dropped her husband back at their apartment, we headed out to the local supermarket. The main shopping for the week had already been done, so we didn’t go to the big supermarket down the road, but this one reminded me of the little supermarket in my own neighborhood on Long Island, which happens to carry a lot of Israeli products. The only big differences were that the majority of brand names were written in Hebrew, even if the typestyle and packaging was the same as in the United States, and, next to the frozen chicken and turkey and ground beef, there was also a quarter of a goat. I don’t usually see goat at my supermarket, but maybe I haven’t been looking carefully enough.

            We made sure to pick up more of the fake Krembos, since they still didn’t have the real Strauss brand in stock, and then we got a few other staples: eggs, seltzer, crackers, etc., nothing too big because this shopping trip was mostly for research purposes.

            I’d either forgotten how outgoing my friend is, or I’d missed a lot, because I was amazed at how many people she seemed to know everywhere we went, and how easily she made conversation with people here and there and everywhere. She kept telling me that her older daughter is the social butterfly of the family, but clearly, she learned it from somewhere.

            After bringing the groceries home, our next event on the schedule was a small outdoor concert, part of a free music festival taking place that weekend in Modiin. The concert was billed as “Kabbalat Shabbat,” which is part of the traditional Friday night services, and it has become popular in Israel to bring religious and secular Jews together early on Friday afternoons, to sing together and welcome in Shabbat, before Shabbat officially begins. Doing it early in the day means that you can play instruments, which aren’t allowed in orthodox synagogues on Shabbat. Because of the rain, the concert was relocated to a school gymnasium, and we found seats near the front just as the show was starting. The small band was made up of four young men: a drummer, a guitarist, one guy on multiple woodwinds, and the bandleader, playing a Persian stringed instrument called a Kenchen that looked like a backwards sauté pan, with strings attached.

(I don’t know these two ladies, but they seemed to be enjoying the music as much as I was)
a closer look at a Kenchen, not my picture

            They played a few traditional Kabbalat Shabbat songs from the Friday night service first, songs that you would hear at almost any synagogue around the world, and then they branched out into Israeli songs with religious themes (songs from Chanan Ben Ari, and Akiva, and Meir Ariel), most of which I knew well and could sing along with. It felt surreal to be sitting in a gym in Israel, singing along with an Israeli crowd, and just like that moment in the Carmel Market when everyone sang and danced together, I felt the magic here too. The fact that the whole concert was in Hebrew, including the patter between the songs, might have been alienating a few years ago, but now, with all of the Hebrew classes and obsessive listening to Israeli music, it barely registered that I was in another country.

At the end of the concert, which came way too fast, my friend jumped up to thank the musicians and see if they knew some of the same people as her older son, a drummer and a sound engineer in training, but I hung back, as usual. I’ve always been in awe of musicians, especially since my attempts to learn piano and guitar (and ukulele and recorder) have not been very successful, so the idea of talking directly to these magical people was more than I could manage. I mean, I could travel across the world, and speak a foreign language, but making actual conversation was just pushing it.

            When we returned to the apartment, the cleaner was already there helping to get the house ready for Shabbat, and chatting to any and everyone in rapid-fire Hebrew, so I escaped to my room to hide, and/or to get myself ready for Shabbat. I tried to remember everything I’d learned from sleepovers way back when about how to manage in an orthodox house on Shabbat, about which lights to leave on (since you aren’t supposed to turn lights on or off during the holiday), and what to wear, and what to say, but I was sure I’d forgotten some of the rules along the way, and I was anxious and self-conscious and, basically, hiding out seemed like a reasonable choice.

            We’d planned to go to Friday night services at the synagogue around the corner, but what with getting the house and ourselves ready, my friend and I missed the Kabbalat Shabbat section of the service, which, given the concert we’d been to that afternoon, worked out just fine.

            It had been a long time since I’d been to a synagogue with a mechitza (a divider between the men’s section and the women’s section), and at their shul there were even separate doors to enter the men’s section and women’s sections, and I’m pretty sure I would have walked in the wrong one if I’d been on my own. A lot of the children in the congregation, boys and girls, were sitting with their fathers in the men’s section, but even so, it was hard to find any free seats in the women’s section. At my synagogue, we struggle to get a good crowd on a Friday night, unless there’s a special event going on, but here, on a regular Friday night, the whole town seemed to have shown up to pray, or at least to see and be seen.

            The rabbi gave a short talk, in Hebrew, and I was able to understand about 80% of what he said. My friend’s synagogue is filled with olim (immigrants) from English speaking countries, but the rabbi is Israeli, so even if most of the chatting among the congregants is in English, they’re all sufficiently fluent in Hebrew to understand and appreciate what the rabbi was saying. I also noticed that whereas at my synagogue everyone follows the cantor carefully, here they had lay people leading services, and since everyone knew the prayers so well they didn’t bother to sing in unison.

            When the service was over, we threaded our way through the sudden crowd, passing a few men with guns on our way out of the synagogue, regular congregants acting as de-facto security guards. It was hard to hear anyone in particular over the hum of neighbors wishing each other a Good Shabbos, but I followed my friend religiously, and was relieved when we found our way out of the crowd for the short walk home in the cool night air.

            We had the Israeli equivalent of a traditional Shabbat dinner, with chicken matzo ball soup and challah and grape juice (like we do in the States) and salatim (salads and spreads), very much not like we do it in the States. My friend’s husband, who made most of the salatim, insisted that I try the olive tapenade (I’m not an olive person), and the herring (bad memories of herring in cream sauce from my childhood), but my favorites were the chummus, and the roasted onion dip, and the eggplant. My Mom is allergic to eggplant, so I was reveling in the chance to try every different version of eggplant as a main part of the meal.

We stayed up late chatting, and watching my friend’s youngest daughter practice for her upcoming dance performance, and then run through every TikTok dance she could remember offhand, before going out to see her friends at the local park. There’s a degree of comfort and safety for kids in Israel that just doesn’t exist in New York. I’m sure things are different in different towns, and maybe Modiin is unique, but the idea that my mom would have been comfortable letting me walk over to the park to meet friends at ten o’clock at night, confident that I would be safe, just didn’t compute.

            I woke up relatively early the next morning, now that my jet lag was wearing off, but I was relieved that my friend and her daughter didn’t want to go to synagogue for morning services. We hung out in the living room, relaxing, until her husband came back from shul to help set the table for the weekly kiddish. They have a group of friends in their neighborhood who make kiddish together every Saturday after services, with snacks and grape juice and wine, and kibbitzing. The men gathered around the table (aka the food) to discuss American politics, even though only half of them are originally from America, and the women gathered on the couches to discuss just about anything but politics, thank you very much. I felt self-conscious in the one skirt I’d brought with me, but it helped that everyone showed up in various states of rain-soaked-ness, since it had started to pour outside. A bunch of the members of the kiddish group were also invited to (or hosting) the lunch we were going to, so the conversation continued through the short walk over to their neighbor’s house, and then at a long table set up down the center of the dining room, kids at one end and adults at the other. The discussion of politics morphed into a review of popular movies and TV and books, all in English, as we ate all of the delicious food spread out across the table (though the kids hogged the pickles, which was not very nice of them. Harrumph).

One of the topics of discussion was the relatively recent phenomenon among young modern orthodox Jews to get piercings and tattoos. We’d actually had discussions at my own synagogue about the old rumor that you couldn’t get buried in a Jewish cemetery if you had a tattoo or piercing, which turned out to be just a rumor, and we’d even read some of the rabbinic responsa (mostly written by modern orthodox rabbis) that said that as long as you’re not tattooing an image of a foreign god on your arm, you’re ok. I found out that, in Israel, often as a post army celebration, groups of soldiers will go out and get matching tattoos, or a helix, a cuff on the upper part of the ear. One of the men at the table said that his two sons, one finishing regular army service and the other finishing reserve duty, coincidentally both went and got a helix, on the same day, without having told each other ahead of time. My idea of what it meant to be orthodox was changing moment by moment, as I met each new person and realized that the existence of a Jewish State really did make room for a wider variety of religious expression.

I hit my socializing limit somewhere along the way, long before everyone else did (they’re better trained for this sort of thing), but everyone was friendly and welcoming and, given that orthodox Jews don’t watch TV or use the computer or phone on Shabbat, spending the time chatting with friends turned out to be a great way to fill the hours. In Israel, it was as if Shabbat was an essential part of their week, rather than an extra obligation, the way it tends to feel among liberal Jews in the U.S. The sense I got in Modiin, but also from things I’ve heard from secular Israelis, is that Shabbat in Israel is a whole vibe. Transportation is limited throughout the country from Friday night to Saturday night (though I think public transportation is still available in Haifa), but it’s more than just not having anywhere else to go: there’s a basic culture of taking the time to spend with friends and family on Shabbat that’s just taken for granted. Kids come home from the army or national service or college, or just from wherever they’re working and living during the week, to spend time with their parents and visit their friends. It’s something they can rely on and look forward to each week, no matter what else is going on in the world.

            Shabbat was over early, given the early sunset this time of year, so we’d made plans to see another friend of ours from high school who lived about thirty minutes away in a more religious area. I was anxious to see her, and self-conscious, worried she’d be annoyed at me for wearing my jeans, or that we’d have nothing in common anymore, but there was no reason for concern, because she was as sweet and bubbly and welcoming as she’d been in high school, and the three of us spent a really nice time going through our old yearbook, reminiscing about all of the people we could remember, and even the ones we couldn’t remember very well at all.

            And then, even though it was past my friend’s regular bed time, she decided that we would go to one more free concert. There was a cover band doing classic Israeli rock songs from the 70s and 80s at a small auditorium, and we found seats right up front by the speakers. Every Israeli member of the audience (aka not me) knew all of the songs by heart, and danced and sang along; and even though I only knew one of the songs (Yoya), the band was so good, and the energy was so infectious, that I found myself singing and dancing with everyone else, from the little children to the great grandparents. The songs seemed to capture a time in all of their lives that was simpler, and more hopeful, and the chance to travel back there with them felt like a gift.

The Band

It was still raining a little bit by the time we left the concert, but we were buzzing with the joy of the whole thing and barely noticed the outside world. My friend often told me over the years that she felt like there was a big gulf between the people who grew up in Israel and those, like her, who had arrived as adults, because of the musical memories she’d missed out on; but this concert, and the whole trip so far, was making me think that a lot of that gap had begun to fill in over time.

I was exhausted from the long day of socializing, and the singing and the dancing, but also excited for the next day and the next adventure, knowing already that whatever it was would be worth the effort.

“Humans are exhausting.“

Some music to try:

Yoya – https://youtu.be/B5xUiayK-Pc?si=8povEpYqVldozV2Q

Chanan Ben Ari – https://youtu.be/z27MZP_4P_U?si=4slADx6ZjXeUkRgA

Akiva – https://youtu.be/u3n2SLWQsXk?si=UPKkErUg5v3DwaJs

Meir Ariel – https://youtu.be/jnbJk3D5X5Q?si=HcQHAlEWbuV9slwT

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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My Israel Trip – Shuk to Shuk

Posted on December 6, 2025 by rachelmankowitz

            The plan for day two of my Israel trip was to go back to Jerusalem, by train this time, and focus on Mahane Yehuda (the big shuk/market in Jerusalem). My friend’s husband helped me figure out how to use the moovit app on my phone to pay for the ticket, and then he drove us to the train station and sent us on our way. It took me a minute to get used to the app, and to having to put my bag (and myself) through airport-style scanners as we entered the train station, but the train ride itself was comfortable and fast, and my friend was in charge of telling me where to go, so I didn’t have to think too hard.

The transition to the light rail from the train just required us to go outside and open the moovit app again, and then wait a few minutes for the train to appear in the middle of the street.  Every seat was filled, even though we were far from rush hour, so we stood by the doors and held on for dear life. I was fascinated by the announcements, written and spoken, in Hebrew, Arabic, and English every time, and the passengers being such a wild mix of people: a girl in a sports bra and sweat pants, next to a man in a black coat and hat, next to a woman with a head covering and long skirt, next to a woman in a hijab; all just getting on with their to-do lists.

When we got off at the stop for Mahane Yehuda, we took a few moments to breathe before diving back into the crowds. I took a picture of a store called “English Cake,” because the sign in Hebrew next to it also sounded out the words “English Cake” in Hebrew letters. There was so much English, everywhere. Once we entered the shuk, there were so many storefronts, and alleyways going in every direction, that it was a bit overwhelming. There were, of course, other tourists like me, but there were also native Jerusalemites, and groups of soldiers in training, and older people rolling shopping baskets through the crowd, and couples doing the family shopping. There was no one type of person in the shuk – people spoke different languages, dressed in every different way, and each one moved at their own unique pace.

            We stopped at one of the fruit stalls to get a smoothie (Mango Tango), because I was low on sugar and already a bit dizzy from the heat of the day (not too hot by Israeli standards, but much warmer than it had been when I’d packed my suitcase in New York). And once I was sufficiently cooled down and sugared up, our first priority was to go to Marzipan bakery. The one thing my brother and nephews had agreed on in their recommendations for where to go in Israel, was that I needed to try the chocolate rugelach at Marzipan bakery; everything else, even the Kotel, was an afterthought. The bakery was relatively small compared to American shops, but big enough to hold an enormous number of cakes and cookies and customers. Along with all of the rugelach, in multiple flavors, there were sufganyiot (donuts for Hanukkah), and cheesecakes, and cookies, and all manner of other wonderful looking things. But I was committed; I needed to try the rugelach or else I wouldn’t be able to return home, so I chose a box with pistachio, chocolate, and chocolate hazelnut varieties, with enough to bring back for my friend’s kids as a bribe, since I was stealing their mom’s attention for days on end.

We found a little park nearby, a few steps away from the shuk, where the cats had already congregated, waiting for us and the rest of the human visitors to stop by with snacks. I had to try a chocolate rugelach first, because that’s the classic, and I discovered that what makes these rugelach so special is that they are incredibly moist, and sweet. The ones I’m used to in New York, which are very good, are made with a soft cookie-like dough and filled with things like chocolate, apricot, or raspberry jam. These, on the other hand, were like a cross between a regular rugelach and baklava, because they are basically marinated in sugar syrup, before and after baking. One was my limit, though, and then I needed to drink a lot of water to chase it down. While I communed with the local cats (I was missing my dog a lot already), my friend volunteered to take a picture for a family on a day trip to Jerusalem. My friend was able to guess which part of Israel they’d come from, just by the way they dressed, but for me it was all still a mystery. She’d told me once that you could tell which town a boy came from by the style of kippah (yarmulke) he wore, but it would take me more than one visit to start to see all of the variations.

Once we were sufficiently rested and hydrated, we headed back into the shuk to find actual lunch-like food. My friend’s older daughter had given us instructions for how to find the best kosher places in the shuk, but we got lost anyway, and wandered through the alleyways, past enormous mangoes, and bright red pomegranates, and every kind of baklava and halva and knafe (another middle eastern dessert), until we found the little storefront for Halaty, where they specialized in chicken schnitzel on a challah roll, plus five or six sauces. We got one sandwich, cut in half, and since neither of us likes spicy food, we only sampled four or five of the sauces. I have no idea what they all were, but they were mostly yummy, except for one sour lemon sauce that was really not my thing.

            As we ate our sandwiches, a tour group came by, with the leader wearing a microphone and speaking in rapid, incomprehensible Hebrew while sandwiches were handed out across the group. I was relieved to be sitting at one of the few tables, chewing at my own pace, instead of having to rush along with a tour group, trying to hear the tour guide over the crowd. I was also starting to wonder if my Hebrew really wasn’t that good after all, since I couldn’t make out a word the tour guide was saying, but my friend said that she was having trouble hearing anything over the noise of the shuk too, so at least we were in it together.

            We continued on our way, past Moroccan sweets in every color, and breads and cheeses and fruits and vegetables. When we had finally hit our limit, on walking and noise and choices, we found a place to sit at an outdoor café, with umbrellas for shade over each table. No one seemed to mind that we were taking up space without ordering anything, so we were able to relax and focus on all of the people bustling around us.

            A couple passed by wearing their rifles like forgotten guitars bouncing against their backs. I’d been warned ahead of time that I would see a lot of soldiers carrying guns, but I hadn’t realized that so many of them would be out of uniform. It turned out that they had to carry their rifles with them, even on leave, because they weren’t allowed to leave their guns home unattended. We also saw girls dressed in sweaters and long pleated skirts, despite the heat, and my friend told me they were seminary girls, studying for the year in Jerusalem before starting national service. And then there was a young mom carrying her baby in her arms, while her husband (I assumed) pushed the baby carriage, filled with plants.

In the middle of all this, two police officers arrived on motorcycles. They stopped by the side of the café and almost immediately they were deep in conversation with a group of young men in t-shirts and shorts, also carrying rifles over their shoulders. It looked like the young men were getting a ticket for some reason, and I was fascinated by the idea that these young men with guns, were casually accepting tickets from police officers, with no sign of danger. But after a while we saw another group of young people arrive to talk to the police officers, and we realized that they were all participating in some kind of scavenger hunt. They seemed to need a paper signed by an officer in order to move on to the next challenge on their list, and the police officers seemed to be happy to play along.

The streets in Jerusalem are so skinny that most people were walking, or riding bikes or scooters, or motorcycles like the police, or taking the light rail like us, rather than driving cars. And there was something magical about the whole scene; like we were outside of time and the normal parameters of modern city life, with young men flying by on their scooters, their tzitzit waving behind them.

As the light started to fade, we made our way back to the light rail, and then to the train back to Modiin. For some reason, I hadn’t realized that the days would be just as short in Israel as they are in New York at this time of year. Somehow, I’d thought the heat would make the days longer, but as we reached Modiin, we caught one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen.

Our chauffeur (my friend’s husband) picked us up from the train station, in between pickups and drops offs of the kids, and we started to make our plan for the next day: Tel Aviv and the Carmel Market (Shuk HaCarmel), to compare and contrast one shuk with another. My next big accomplishment was taking a shower, and then we had dinner and rugelach, and my friend and I stayed up late talking, even though we’d been talking all day long.

            Of course, overnight my self-consciousness/anxiety came roaring back, and I was critiquing the clothes I’d brought with me (too plain, too shapeless, too warm, etc.), and I was worried about Shabbat coming up (I hadn’t spent a Shabbat at a religious person’s house in a very long time, and I was sure I’d forgotten some of the rules along the way and would do something stupid or offensive without meaning to). But I shook it off the best I could, and let my friend’s husband make me breakfast (I’m so generous!), and then we headed into Tel Aviv, driving this time instead of taking the train. We passed so many McDonald’s signs along the way that it was hard to believe we weren’t in New York, but the road signs were in English, Hebrew, and Arabic, so we were clearly still in Israel. After a few trips around the neighborhood, my friend was able to find a tiny parking lot around the corner from the shuk, and we headed off on our next adventure.

            Shuk HaCarmel/Carmel Market felt less crowded than Mahane Yehuda, if only because the alleyways were wider, so there was more room to move. There was yet another scavenger hunt going on, and this time we got to see it from the beginning as a large group of youngish people were divided into three teams. They seemed more like a work group this time, since there were no obvious guns, but I didn’t have the nerve to ask.

There were more clothing and tchotchke stalls at Shuk HaCarmel than I’d seen in Mahane Yehuda (though it’s possible I’d missed some of the meandering alleyways in Jerusalem the day before), and I was surprised by how few places in the shuk were kosher enough for my Modern Orthodox friend to eat at. I’d always thought one of the reasons to live in Israel was to make it easier to be Jewish overall, and it certainly is a lot easier, but in a country where 20 percent of the population isn’t Jewish, and even among the Jewish population at least half are not religious at all, and the rest have multiple/conflicting ideas for the right way to be Jewish, I should have known it would be more complicated.

            We stopped at one stall to watch the process of spiral cutting a baking potato, and then deep frying it, like one long curly French fry, and then we gawked at all kinds of touristy stalls, filled with t-shirts and jewelry and other kitschy things. The crowd in Tel Aviv seemed to be more homogeneous than in Jerusalem: mostly young to middle-aged, mostly wearing t-shirts and jeans or shorts, with fewer overtly religious people, and fewer older people. Somewhere along the way, I also realized that I wasn’t seeing all of the beggars I’d seen in Jerusalem, but there were still a ton of babies. It’s one of the things you notice right away in Israel, after the stray cats: babies are everywhere. There’s a lot of encouragement to have children in Israel, with socialized medicine, and free public schools, and healthcare that covers fertility treatments, etc., but it’s more than that: children are welcomed almost everywhere, at any age, and no matter how independent they become as they grow up, they are always expected home for Shabbat.

            I was enjoying the window shopping, and the people watching, and then we arrived at the Malawach stand my friend’s daughter had recommended, situated at a little intersection in the shuk. Israeli music was playing from the speakers, and when a popular old Israeli dance song came on (Od Lo Ahavti Dai), the whole crowd started to sing along, and a group of women automatically created a circle to do the dance, as if their bodies couldn’t help it. The circle dissolved just as quickly as it had formed, but that moment, when everyone just stopped to sing and dance together, was magical. The Malawach guy refused to cut one sandwich in half for us to share this time, so I had to take a whole one for myself. Malawach is a layered, fluffy, Yemeni bread, filled with much more oil than your standard pita, and rolled up in each Malawach there were hardboiled eggs and tomatoes and chummus, and maybe some other things I don’t remember, and it was possibly the best thing I’ve ever eaten.

            Eventually, we left the shuk and walked over to Rothschild Blvd., a wide-open street with space to sit and relax, or ride a bike or a scooter, down the middle of the divider. My friend had looked up the address for my online Hebrew language school for me, because I’d said that I might want to see it in person, but I was dragging my feet. My social anxiety is no joke, and I was trying to come up with as many excuses as possible not to visit the school, and potentially have to make a fool of myself, but my friend dragged me into the building, and up to the right floor, where the offices for the school were located in a shared workspace (they look so much bigger in the pictures!). Luckily, no one was in the offices at the time, so I didn’t have to come up with anything brilliant to say, and yet I could still say that I went there and did that. Check!

After that accomplishment, we headed back to the car, and then spent the next hour and a half in the famous Tel Aviv traffic. Traffic has become one of the enduring topics of the sentences they teach us in Hebrew class (Pkok, in Hebrew. It’s also really fun to say), so, I got to check yet another important Israel experience off my list. Though, lesson learned, if we decided to go back to Tel Aviv, we’d take the train.

            But honestly, I didn’t mind the long drive. One, because I didn’t have to do the driving, and two, because it gave us more time to talk. It’s been a long time since my friend and I have been able to spend an extended period of time together, the way we used to do in high school. On her visits to the states, we tend to get a couple of hours to chat, which barely scratches the surface, but spending all of this time together let us get to all of the conversations we’d missed out on over the years: the deeper truths, the background information, the assumptions we’d made about each other, and the questions we’d never asked. And somewhere along the way, I started to realize that even though visiting Israel was my stated goal, seeing my friend and getting to know her again was the real joy of the trip.

            When we got back to Modiin, I was introduced to yet another Israeli staple: Krembo. Except, the store where my friend’s husband had been shopping didn’t have the real Strauss brand Krembo in stock, they only had something called Membo. Krembo is iconic in Israel: with a cookie base, a ton of soft meringue filling, and covered with a thin layer of chocolate. It’s what a Mallomar might be like, if it were three times the size and much much fluffier. Even the Membos were impressive, though I was assured that the real Krembo was even better.

Krembo (not my picture)

            We were still finishing the rugelach, to go with the Membos, and then we had hamburgers and French fries for dinner, which the kids actually ate on their way to and from different activities, and as I failed to stuff one more French fry into my mouth, it was a relief to know that Shabbat was coming, which meant we had an excuse to stay close to home for the next two days. There was still so much to see and do, but I was ready for a break from all of the walking and traveling and sight-seeing. The weather was also starting to shift into their version of winter (the rainy season), and I was looking forward to some cooler air, and the rain, and the chance to rest and start to process everything I’d seen so far.

“When is my mommy coming home?”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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My Israel Trip: Day One

Posted on November 29, 2025 by rachelmankowitz

            From the beginning, it was something of an out of body experience. I took a car service to the airport, waving goodbye to Mom in the parking lot of our co-op, chatting with the driver about all manner of things (gardening, mothers, compression socks, and, of course, traffic at the airport). When I arrived at Terminal Four at JFK, I was immediately overwhelmed: people were rushing in different directions and there were no clear signs, that I could see, telling me where to go. I had already checked in online, so I was pretty sure I didn’t need to stop at a check-in kiosk, but beyond that I was lost. I asked a man in uniform (hopefully he actually worked there), and he directed me to a woman who was checking boarding passes. I showed her my electronic boarding pass and she let me through, and then I had to show my electronic boarding pass (AKA my phone) to two more women as I followed the crowd around cones and other obstacles onto the security line. I tried to do exactly what everyone else on the line was doing, showing my passport, lugging my carry-on and my personal bag into the gray buckets and pushing them towards the scanner, but I must have missed some of the instructions because my personal bag was pulled aside and I had to wait on another line until they could hand check it, and tell me that I was supposed to have taken my laptop computer out before putting the bag through the scanner. Live and learn.

“You should have stayed home with me.”

            When they sent me on my way, I still wasn’t sure where I was supposed to go next. People were wandering in a bunch of different directions, and signs listed different lounges and gates and floors, but nothing said: this is the way to EL AL. I followed an elderly couple to the elevator, which said “to all gates,” and followed them in, and, luckily, when the doors opened there was finally a big screen listing the destinations and flight times and gates, and I found my flight on the list and followed the arrows to my gate. At least, I thought I was following the arrows in the right direction. I walked past endless toy stores and candy stores and restaurants and people waiting at other gates for other planes, but I couldn’t find my gate. Eventually, I found another nice man in a uniform (this time I was pretty sure he worked for the airport, or at least for one of the airlines), and he directed me to go back to where I’d started and then keep going in that direction. Finally, after walking through what felt like the whole airport, I found my gate and sat down in the waiting area – two hours before boarding was set to begin. They say to get to the airport three hours before your flight, just in case.

            I spent the next two hours people watching, and texting with Mom. There were casually dressed couples (jeans and t-shirts like me) carrying babies, and Haredi men in long back coats with special boxes to carry their hats, and Yeshiva boys in khakis and polo shirts and black suede kippot studying and eating together at a work table. There were also enough other solo female travelers to make me feel less conspicuous than I’d expected, and people reading actual hardcover books like the one hiding at the bottom of my bag while I stole a few last looks at my phone. At some point, there was a group of men on the other side of the waiting area saying the afternoon prayers, and then ten minutes later, after sunset I assume, another group gathered to say the evening prayers, and then our flight was called to start boarding.

            I showed my electronic boarding pass to the woman guarding the line to board the plane, but she said, “Oh no, I will not look at that. You need a paper boarding pass.” Luckily the line at the EL AL desk was short, and I only had to go through a short security interview (Do you understand Hebrew? Are you sure? Why are you going to Israel? Where are you staying?), and then they scanned my passport, and handed me my paper boarding pass and sent me through to the plane.

            The last flight I’d been on was years earlier, and barely two hours long, so I was anxious about the 11-hour flight, without Wi-Fi and with no one to talk to. When I found my seat, a nice man (no uniform this time) helped me lift my carry-on suitcase into the overhead compartment, and then I discovered that my personal bag didn’t actually fit under the seat in front of me, the way all the videos said it would, and there was no more room in the storage compartments, so I was going to have to sit with my legs on an angle for the whole flight. At least I had an aisle seat, though. I’ve been watching Stephen Colbert do his Colbert Questionnaire for a very long time, so I knew I was supposed to get an aisle seat, rather than a window seat, to avoid having to climb over someone else to get to the bathroom.

            I felt some panic just before takeoff, thinking about every possible thing that could go wrong on the trip, and feeling trapped because getting back home would be so much harder midair, but it passed, eventually. I watched my seatmate to find out how to use the entertainment system in front of my seat, and I found a bunch of Israeli TV shows, in Hebrew, which I hoped would help me acclimate to all of the Hebrew I’d be hearing in Israel. I ended up finding a really interesting interview show and watched episode after episode: with an Israeli actress, a past Minister of communications, a former head of Mossad, an Arab Israeli reporter, a comedian who specialized in doing impressions (including of Netanyahu), and the current head of the opposition in the Knesset. We were served dinner about an hour into the flight, and I had to watch my seatmate to figure out where to find the folding tray table hidden in the armrest, but I never figured out how to turn on a light to be able to read my book once the overhead lights were turned down.

They served breakfast about an hour before we landed in Israel, and at that point, a lot of the men on the plane got up to pray the morning prayer, even though it still felt like the middle of night to me.

I’d heard horror stories about people being pulled from the security line and interviewed by customs officials for hours upon landing at Ben Gurian airport, but when we landed, I barely had to wait on line before my passport was checked and I was sent on through. Then I followed a big family through the maze of hallways until I finally reached the arrivals lounge, where I had just enough time to switch my phone to my temporary Israeli telephone number before my friend arrived to pick me up.

            I hadn’t slept at all on the plane, but somehow, I wasn’t tired, so she drove us straight to the Western Wall (The Kotel) in Jerusalem. I’d been promised that I would feel inspired just entering Jerusalem, and that being at the Kotel (the only outer wall remaining after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE) would be profound, but as we walked through the alleyways of the old city, past endless groups of Israeli school children on day trips with their teachers, and groups of soldiers in training, also on day trips with their teachers, I didn’t feel much of anything.

Don’t those kids look inspired?!

It was a long walk on hard stone, down steps and around corners, until we were at the Kotel, and my first impression of this ancient holy place was, eh, it’s kind of dinky. I mean, it’s a wall, with some greenery growing out of it, and pieces of paper stuck in every crevice, but it didn’t glow or anything, and no great voice called down from the heavens telling me that I was home. I’d been warned that I would need to wear a skirt to go to the Kotel, and that there were women guarding the entrance who would insist on wrapping me in a scarf to cover my pants, but it turned out those women were out for the day, or distracted, and I was able to walk in wearing my jeans and t-shirt from the plane. The women’s section was significantly smaller than the men’s section, but one of the men had already climbed up to peer over the divider to see what the women were doing.

            There were plastic chairs set up for us to sit in, but many more women were standing right up against the wall, holding their prayer books and shuckling back and forth. A lot of the women wore long skirts, and elaborate scarves wrapped multiple times around their heads, and prayed with great feeling, but I just sat there and watched. I was fascinated by a pigeon with a peg leg. I don’t actually know if he actually had a peg leg or if he was just missing his foot, but he walked like a pirate and kept scanning the ground for crumbs. A little boy nearby was carrying a bag of snack chips, even though my friend told me you weren’t supposed to bring food to the area, so the bird was on the right track.

            I didn’t feel like praying, or writing a note to shove into the wall. I’d always imagined that there would be a notepad and pen set up nearby, and ladders, so you could put your note into a crevice away from public view, but no. The notes were all homemade and folded into tiny shapes in order to fit into the tiniest spaces in the wall, and you had to really look closely in order to see them. The most interesting thing, to me, was the way many of the women would back away from the wall as they left, and when I asked my friend about it, she said it was a sign of respect, because you shouldn’t turn your back on God. For my own safety, I didn’t risk the maneuver myself, because I was sure I would trip over my feet, or a spare child, so I walked out facing forward while my friend walked out backwards. I hope God understands.

            On our way back up the steps, I finally saw my first Israeli cats (they have stray cats everywhere) and took a picture to send to Mom as my first missive from the holy land. Then we wound our way back through the alleyways, passing little shops and food stalls and tour groups, and many men and women carrying paper cups, asking for money. They didn’t look like the unhoused people I used to see in the subway in New York, more like this was their job and they were proud of it. I could picture them finishing a long day of begging for money from strangers and returning home to their modest Jerusalem apartments to put their feet up and watch TV. At one point, there was a cat stretched out on a low wall, next to a discarded paper cup, but he didn’t make a move to ask for spare change. He seemed confident that someone would feed him eventually.

I’d read all about Jerusalem Syndrome, and how so many people went crazy and started to think they were God just because they were breathing the air in Jerusalem, but I guess I’m immune. I should have known that I wouldn’t be a good candidate for delusions of grandeur.

After visiting the old city, we drove around Jerusalem while my friend played tour guide. She’d lived in Jerusalem when she first made Aliyah, in her 20’s, so it was all very familiar and homey for her. She drove us through the different neighborhoods and past the Israel museum and the Knesset and the Supreme court and the National Library – everywhere a bus tour would have taken us – and then she pointed out the hotel where she’d had her wedding (which I missed, of course), and the neighborhood where her parents were living, though they were out of the country at the moment. And as we drove around Jerusalem, and then out towards her home, my friend and I started to catch up. We’d seen each other every few years when she came to visit family in the States, and of course we’d chatted through email and then WhatsApp, but this was, already, the most time we’d spent together in years, and I started to remember why we became friends in the first place: no matter how shy and anxious and out-of-body I felt, she was able to make to me feel seen and heard and comfortable. I’d been worried that I would feel like a burden, or that we’d have nothing to say to each other, but she was doing everything she could to let me know that I was welcome, and that she was looking forward to our next adventure.

            When we arrived in Modiin, about thirty minutes outside of Jerusalem, it was still light out, and I was surprised to find that the city looked suspiciously like White Plains, NY – with all of the newness and crispness of an upper middle-class enclave. It’s a very young, planned city, so it doesn’t have the tiny alleyways of Jerusalem, or the crowded streets, and the wide-open spaces made it easier to breathe.

First view of Modiin

            My friend’s four-bedroom apartment was huge, and in the process of being cleaned by her Yemeni Israeli house cleaner, whose rapid-fire Hebrew was matched by my friend’s equally rapid-fire Israeli-accented Hebrew – all too fast for me to follow. Of course, I knew that my friend spoke Hebrew – I mean, she’d lived in Israel for decades – but I hadn’t realized she would sound like someone who’d been born there. Up until that point, and on all of our visits in the States, we’d only spoken to each other in English.

            I was set up in her older daughter’s room (since she was away doing national service), and, as I unpacked I, of course, fell back into my out-of-body, what-am-I-doing-here state of mind. I was trying to hide from the cleaning lady, who was busy mopping the living room floor with what looked like a squeegee, because she’d already asked me ten or fifteen personal questions, in Hebrew, about my career and family and where my friend and I knew each other from, and I was afraid the questions were going to get steadily more intrusive. I checked my email and found out that I’d received another rejection from one of my agent queries, which I guess is better than the silence I was getting in response to most of the others, but it didn’t feel great. I focused on unpacking and getting my bearings, and when the house cleaner was finished my friend introduced me to the two kids who were still living at home, and her husband (who I’d met briefly a few times over the years) and the family rabbit, Choo, who spent most of his time meditating in his cage, or wandering out in the yard, on the look out for stray cats so he could rush back to safety at any moment.

Choo, the rabbit

            I don’t remember what we ate for dinner that first night, or what I did or said for the rest of the evening, until it was time to go to bed. I’d been awake for something like 36 hours by then, but I was still too keyed up to sleep, so when everyone went to bed, I went to my room and watched hours of Glee videos on my phone, spending some time with Cory Monteith, the lead actor on Glee, until his untimely death from an accidental overdose. For some reason he felt like a good friend, even though I’d never met him. It was an odd sensation, to find so much comfort in someone I didn’t even know, and who was no longer around, as if my brain was able to manufacture this reassuring presence to help manage my anxiety.

            Eventually, I fell asleep, and slept well. I woke up late the next morning when my friend knocked on my door, after already having done the laundry and emptying and filling the dishwasher and sending the kids off to school and getting a few hours of work done. I washed and dressed quickly, took my meds, ate some breakfast, and, with a few more deep breaths, I was ready to start day two.

“Wait, all of that was just day one? This is going to take forever.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Falling Into Glee

Posted on November 22, 2025 by rachelmankowitz

            It started a few weeks ago, when I mentioned Glee in a class (Talking Shpilkes), and talked with my students about the way they used to use mashups in the show, combining two songs from different genres to bring something new out of the combination. A student asked me for concrete examples, and I dutifully typed Glee into the search bar on YouTube, but was interrupted by the dismissal bell. I forgot all about it, but the YouTube algorithm remembered, so among the videos about places to visit in Israel, and Israeli music, and instructions on how to pack for an international trip, I started to see a few songs from Glee here and there. I had watched Glee when it aired originally, about fifteen years ago, and enjoyed it a lot, but I hadn’t spent much time thinking about it in the interim. So, I thought, I’ll just watch one video, one song, to remind myself of what the show was like, especially because I couldn’t remember which songs they’d used for mashups, and I was starting to worry that I’d imagined the whole thing. Almost immediately, I fell into a black hole of Glee videos: the top 100 songs on Glee, and then the top 200, and then the best mashups, and the saddest songs, and the best duets, and on and on.

Each day, I assumed I’d watched as many videos as I could stand, and I’d just watch one more, and then the binge would start all over again. I tried to understand I was getting so sucked in, especially when I couldn’t even find full episodes of the show, just short clips of the musical numbers. I thought the timing of the binge might be significant, because here I was watching scenes from a show about high school the week before a planned visit to Israel to see my best friend from high school. There was also something about the way the actors sang and danced full out, every time, pushing the emotions out to their fingertips, that was cathartic for me; because that’s how life feels, even if it doesn’t look that way from the outside. Each song seemed to crack me open and tap into emotions I’d long ago learned to contain, or repress.

            On Glee, as opposed to in my real life, they were able to find the right songs to express everything that needed to be said, and watching one performance after another, I felt like I was connecting to those lost or hidden parts of myself. But while watching these “kids” (the actors were mostly in their twenties) perform was cathartic, it was also bittersweet, because all of the old expectations and comparisons came rushing back; all of the feelings of not being good enough or talented enough or brave enough. And I remembered the anxiety that came with performing, too; it wasn’t just a little stage fright for me, it was crippling.

            I did my best to overcome my fears. I took voice lessons, and I went to a musical theatre camp. I wrote my own songs and poems and plays. I used to sing and dance in the halls in elementary school, and for a long time I would dance around the kitchen while Mom was making dinner, telling her about my day. But when I tried to perform in public, the anxiety got in the way.

            And then, as I continued to watch more and more videos from Glee, I started seeing the videos about the death of Cory Montieth, the male lead on the show. I don’t even remember how I reacted at the time of his actual death during the run of the show, but now it was tapping into my grief at all of the things I’d lost, or never had in the first place. I started to think that if I just watched one more video, Cory would come back to life. Or maybe it was a mistake, and Cory Monteith didn’t actually overdose, they got it wrong, and he was still alive, somewhere. But each time I watched, the tribute episode replayed, and no amount of watching or hoping could bring him back to life.

            I couldn’t understand why his death was hitting me so hard, so many years later, or why the reality of his death was so hard for me to accept. I didn’t have the same reaction to his co-star Naya Rivera’s accidental drowning a few years after the show ended.

In a way, Finn, Cory Monteith’s character on the show, may have represented that one person I was waiting for, the man who would make me feel acceptable and loveable, and the grief at never having found him, and never having found that feeling of acceptance internally. Or he could represent someone who was willing to try and fail; because he wasn’t one of the musical theatre prodigies on the show, competing for the number one spot. He was just loving the work, and putting everything he had into it. He was the cast member I would have wanted to know, and hang out with. It would have been a joy to make him laugh. And yet, he must have been struggling, fighting old demons, all along.

After he died, from an accidental drug overdose just before shooting for the fifth season was supposed to begin, it became clear that he had been the heart of the show. He must have been such a relief to be around, after the constant competition and backbiting of the showbusiness life many of them had been living since childhood. He was the one who made Glee accessible, and made the audience feel like we could be part of things, even if we didn’t have Lea Michele or Amber Riley’s voices. And he was having so much fun!

Finn (Cory) and Rachel (Lea) on Glee

I don’t think Finn resonated for me the first time I watched Glee, ten to fifteen years ago. I would have been much more focused on the Lea Michele/Amber Riley rivalry, or the love story between the teachers, Mr. Shue and Miss Pillsbury. But it all hit differently this time. And my favorite moments weren’t about the best vocals, or the most dramatic or comedic scenes, it was all about the duets between Cory and Lea Michele, and the way he seemed to love and respect her (you can see it in the show, and in interviews. It pours off of him). While there were a million things the other cast members could do that he couldn’t, his great talent seemed to be his ability to create believable relationships. He made each relationship on the show feel real, and heartfelt, and reliable. And then he died.

            There’s been a lot of behind the scenes gossip about Lea Michele (the female lead on the show and his real-life girlfriend), about how she treated other actors disrespectfully; that she was a bully, or even a racist. My own sense was that she was very much like her character on the show: single-minded about her goals in life, and unaware of how her behavior impacted other people. And then Cory died, and she shut down. It seemed like a lot of the worst stories about her came from those years, after his death. And I kept thinking about how much Cory seemed to love her, and how Jonathan Groff (her best friend and another extraordinary triple threat Broadway actor) loves her, and how she can sing in a way that breaks my heart open, and it made me want to give her the benefit of the doubt.

            Also, watching some of the behind-the-scenes videos of Ryan Murphy (the creator of the show) made me think that a lot of the drama among the actors came from the way he led them at the time. He created a beautiful, if imperfect show, that inspired an enormous amount of people to be more fully themselves, but he often did it through manipulating and exposing his actors’ inner lives, unintentionally causing harm.

            The genius of the show is also the most painful thing about it: it feels real. It’s a heightened, melodramatic, glorious, and heartbreaking trek through the growth process, and inadvertently, it created a vivid picture of how grief can shatter people. They did their best to wrap up the show neatly, but at the heart of it all is the reality that the story didn’t get to finish; the dramatic arc broke when Cory died. And something about that brokenness just kept sticking with me and echoing.  

I thought the binge, and the resonance, would end once I got to Israel, with so much to see and feel, but it continued. And one thing I realized, as my high school friend and I spent hours traipsing across Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and reminiscing about the past and catching up on what we’d missed over the years, was that my friend also has a talent for relationships, just like Cory Monteith. She has the ability to make all kinds of people feel comfortable and welcome. She is full of curiosity, and open about her own struggles, and generous to a fault with her time and attention: offering to take a picture for the group of tourists at Caesaria; offering to watch a guy’s double-parked car while he helped his girlfriend move in Old Yafo/Jaffa; willing to take in an old friend for more than a week and show her around Israel.

I wish I could say that I’ve unraveled the whole Glee mystery for myself, and figured out what I need to learn from it, and figured out how to tolerate knowing that this man I never knew really is gone, but that would be a lie. It will take me a while to process the impact of my Glee binge, and the impact of the Israel trip. But don’t worry, I’ll get to the details of the trip in my next blog post, with plenty of pictures, and maybe I’ll even get some things figured out. Eventually.

“Don’t forget pictures of me, Mommy.”

Songs to get you started on Glee:

(The song that started it all) “Don’t Stop Believing” – https://youtu.be/1FaJshIWdpU?si=aIf5vvYV0pcHaK1n

(The crush) Cory Monteith – Jessie’s Girl – https://youtu.be/6twI8pyeRF0?si=ZlkvnjJVgCW9KEkC

(The Love) Pretending/Light Up the World –https://youtu.be/0j5wIDfYNB8?si=VGPkr1yhJ3MOmOgT

(The loss) Lea Michele – Make you feel my love – https://youtu.be/z-uLll_cZHs?si=DdrUIus25tAjKQz_

(Just a great song and performance from Lea Michele) To Love You More – https://youtu.be/hQQT49lEM7I?si=CWQSN3qOetxRm544

There are so many more, but these should get the binge rolling.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Friday Night Services

Posted on November 8, 2025 by rachelmankowitz

            For a long time now, I’ve attended most of the Friday night services at my synagogue online. At least last year I had to go in person once a month to teach, but our program changed and I no longer teach on Friday nights, so even those services have been lost. Part of the change is physical: I’m just so tired by the end of the day, and at the beginning, and in the middle. One small trip to the grocery store wipes me out so much that I need a three-hour nap just to recover. After that, I can’t even fathom taking a shower and getting dressed to go to synagogue, not even when one of my former students is marking their b’nei mitzvah, despite the promise I made to myself that I would go to every Friday night service for every student who’d ever been in my class.

            I’ve always been tired, and I’ve always been in pain, but still, something has shifted.

Tzippy can relate.

            Maybe it happened when our senior rabbi cut down to a quarter time, and started to show signs of age, so that even when he’s there and vibrant and funny and inspiring, there’s still this underlying sense of doom and grief, as if a clock is ticking in the background.

            Maybe it happened when I started taking weight loss medication, and something in the mechanism that cuts my appetite also cut into my ability to enjoy the rest of my life.

            Maybe all of the antisemitism that’s been unleashed since October 7th has finally pulled me under, because it doesn’t feel temporary anymore. After the ceasefire, it doesn’t feel like something with a cause and effect anymore. It feels endemic.

            Maybe it’s all of the rejection, after sending my writing out for so many years, with no idea why I’m not what anyone’s looking for.

            I still had some sense of energy last spring – I can vaguely remember what it felt like – when I started to plan the Israel trip, and started researching agents for the new book. I even felt hopeful, and brave, and willing to push through the hard tasks and difficult feelings to get to the good stuff on the other side.

            My hope is that the current malaise is a side effect of my travel anxiety, and once I get to Israel and the anxiety can disperse, I’ll find the rest of my feelings, and I will feel brave again. But I miss the feeling of hope that pushed me to start going to Friday night services in person way back when, and to make the effort to talk to new people and to sing and to speak up. I miss the feeling that I was building up to something, creating something that would continue to grow and bring me joy and comfort.

            Maybe I just need to recommit to the practice of going to services on Friday nights, forcing myself out of the house no matter how tired I am, the way I used to do before zoom services were a thing. I don’t know. Maybe spending a shabbat in Israel will wake something up in me that has been on pause for a while, and I’ll be ready to make more of an effort once I get back home. That would be something to look forward to.

“I’m ready.”

            (I’ll be away from the blog for the next couple of weeks, but hopefully I will have a lot to share when I return. Fingers crossed!)

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Blurry Vision

Posted on November 1, 2025 by rachelmankowitz

            My glasses broke. I’ve had the same pair of glasses for a very long time, because I like the frames and because my prescription hasn’t really changed in years, so I got lulled into believing they would last forever. As soon as the frames broke, and one of the lenses fell into my lap, I panicked: It’s the end of the world! God hates me! I will never see clearly again! I’ll have to feel my way across Israel in a fog!

“Oy. Mommy’s losing it.”

            I tried taping the frames, and then Mom went the extra step and tried gluing them, but it was hopeless, until Mom asked if I had a back up pair and I remembered that there was an old pair of glasses in my cabinet-of-lost-things and when I put the glasses on, I could at least see where I was going.

            This all happened on Saturday night, early Sunday morning, so I had plenty of time to wallow in my helplessness and ruminate on my inability to function in the real world and think about how useless I would be out in the wild (I don’t know where the idea came from that I would be dropped out into the wild, possibly by helicopter, to survive on my own, but I have always had this image in mind and have always been convinced that it would not go well).

            The next morning, we went to the Pearle Vision Center nearby (almost around the corner, though I’d never noticed it before), and asked if they could fix the frame (yes, but it would take two weeks and the fix would only be temporary), and then if I could get a new pair of glasses a bit sooner than that (since I would be leaving for my trip in fifteen days), and they said they could get the glasses done by Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on when I could get them a copy of my prescription.

            I chose frames, and then the woman in charge immediately chose different frames for me (probably more expensive, but much nicer than the ones I’d chosen for myself, and I was in no mood to quibble), and then she gave me a store card and wrote out the email address and told me to have my eye doctor send them my prescription as soon as possible.

            When we got home, I was actually able to find my prescription from the original-now-broken glasses, and I was able to send it to her right away and pay for the glasses over the phone,  and she told me I’d get a text when the glasses were ready.

            In the meantime, everything was a little blurry. I’m nearsighted, so even with the out-of-date prescription, writing and reading up close were fine, but there was no way I could read subtitles on TV, and individual figure skaters looked like fuzzy twigs. Fortunately, Hallmark movies, with all of their bright colors and constant sound were perfect. Driving was also, surprisingly fine, though I didn’t risk taking any long trips.

            It was lucky that this happened now, instead of when I’m away in Israel, but it also reminded me of all of the things that could go wrong and set off waves of panic. Except, while my internal experience of all of this felt chaotic and frightening, Mom said I was handling it all really well, asking the right questions, speaking clearly, making solid decision, etc. I wish my internal experience reflected that, but it’s reassuring to know that even if I’m freaking out, I seem okay on the outside. I just wish I could feel as calm as I look, because then there’d be so much more I could do. Anxiety is really exhausting.

“This is news to you?”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Talking Shpilkes

Posted on October 25, 2025 by rachelmankowitz

            Shpilkes is a Yiddish word that literally means “pins,” but has come to refer to “sitting on pins and needles,” or, feeling fidgety and nervous and needing to move.

            When I teach this word to my students, I tend to liken it to the ADHD symptoms they see in so many of their classmates (because even the undiagnosed kids seem to have shpilkes by the end of a long school day, which is when they come to me). This time, I was sitting with a mixed age group of kids, from second to sixth grade, for our twenty-minute elective period at the end of synagogue school for the day, and we were all exhausted and ready to go home.

            I gave them the option of sitting at their desks or on the floor, but most of them chose to sit at their desks, except for the one girl who chose to sit in my rolling chair, so I sat on the floor by myself. Whatever. As a warm up, I asked them to repeat the word “shpilkes” with me, over and over, because it’s just fun to say. We’d already done a session on Kvetching (complaining) before the holiday break, and I knew we weren’t ready to move straight to Kvelling (expressing joy at someone else’s accomplishments), so shpilkes was the next step on our Yiddish ladder.

“Kvelling sounds terrible.”

            Once they’d giggled through the word a few times, I asked them if they had ever experienced having shpilkes themselves, or if they knew someone else who struggled to sit still, and they told stories about friends who couldn’t sit still, or couldn’t shut up, though no one was willing to jump in yet and admit that they themselves might struggle with sitting still. Then, one girl raised her hand shyly and said, I know someone who’s the opposite. She can get so focused on reading a book that she doesn’t hear what’s going on around her.

I asked if anyone else knew someone who could get so caught up, or if they’d experienced something like that themselves, and the stories kept coming. And then one of them asked, do you know the feeling when a song gets stuck in your head and you can’t get it out! Which led to an in-depth discussion of earworms and what causes them and how to treat them. One girl had developed a whole theory, saying that earworms are caused when you forget some of the lyrics to a song you like, so your brain just keeps repeating the song to try and remember the lost words. Her suggested treatment was to go to Spotify and listen to the song until the earworm crawled away in defeat, which, she said, worked every time.

            Aren’t our brains fascinating?! I said, from my seat on the floor. By then, one of the students had joined me on the floor, because all this talk of shpilkes had reminded him that chairs and desks are confining and it’s much more comfortable to stretch out.

            But, what about when one friend has shpilkes and the other friend has to deal with the consequences? Because, my friend keeps getting us into trouble when she talks in class, and she can’t help it, but we’re going to get kicked out and I really like that class.

To which one of the younger boys said, Yeah, it’s hard when you can’t understand why someone acts the way they do, even though you still like them and want to spend time with them. I’m paraphrasing, but only a little.

            And with minutes left to go, and so many more stories to tell and hands raised and legs swinging, I asked them if they’d ever seen a show called Glee (a few of them had, actually. Streaming makes everything new again). Glee was a TV show about a high school glee club, where they often took two songs from different genres and mashed them toegther, and sometimes, not all the time, the mash-up allowed us to hear each song in a new way because of how the two songs spoke to each other. The kids didn’t even need me to hammer the point home. They already had their hands up with stories to share about their friends who are really different from them but make life so interesting.

            Of course, my most literal student asked if I could supply examples, and I did try to find something from Glee on my phone, but the dismissal announcement interrupted me, and then we had to focus on listening to the walkie talkie calling out names one by one. But even then, more stories were spilling out, and each story reminded someone of another story, and another.

            It doesn’t always go like this. My current regular class has so much collective shpilkes that it feels like we’re hiking through a tornado just to get from the beginning of a sentence to the end. But sitting on the floor, listening to the stories flow around the room, reminded me that they all have so much going on inside of them, and sometimes, if I’m very lucky, they will share their stories with me in a way I can hear them.

“I only get Shpilkes in the middle of the night, when everyone else is sleeping.“

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Packing Practice

Posted on October 18, 2025 by rachelmankowitz

            In anticipation of my Israel trip, and to try to allay some of my overall anxiety, I decided to do a practice run at packing. I planned it for the two-week Sukkot break from teaching (after the Jewish High Holidays), on the assumption that full days would be filled with perseverating and procrastinating, which they were.

            Earlier in the summer, I went through a marathon effort to research everything for the trip, watching endless videos about where to go and what to bring and how to pack it correctly, and then I spent way too much time on Amazon buying all kinds of things I was sure I would need. In my defense, the high level of anxiety made it very hard for me to think clearly, which also explains why I ended up with multiples of a bunch of things, because I forgot what I’d already ordered.

“Why couldn’t you have forgotten to take me to the groomer?

            The goal of the practice packing was to : 1) figure out if I could take just a carry on and a personal bag, or if I’d need a bigger suitcase that I would have to check in (which all of the videos told me not to do); and 2) to see if there was anything I’d forgotten to buy (like quart-sized Ziploc bags, for packing liquids and medications, according to the rules).

            But first I had to recover from my Yom Kippur cold, and then watch guiltily as Mom suffered from her own version of the cold, and then I had to catch up on errands that I’d had to put off during the holidays and the ensuing sick-in (like laundry and food shopping and multiple trips to the drug store). And then I had no more excuses. Except, I still couldn’t even look at the pile of stuff from Amazon that had been living on my treadmill for months, or at the packing list I’d made after watching and rewatching and summarizing and analyzing all of those videos.

            I tried to think of ways to make the task more manageable, to Bird-by-Bird it, the way I do with everything else that overwhelms me (I know that Anne Lamott meant her wisdom to be used specifically for writing projects, breaking down a big project into smaller tasks, bird by bird, but for me it has become a helpful way to portion out all kinds of difficult tasks). But even the thought of looking at my packing list, or opening the bag of compression packing cubes, set off images in my mind of being pulled out of the security line by giant men with mustaches (for some reason), and stun guns.

            Finally, in a moment of desperation, I poured all of the Amazon items onto my bed, so I could go through them and see what I had actually bought. The two extra crossbody bags and the extra power adaptor made me feel silly, it’s true, but it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. Most of the things I’d bought were useful, if not strictly necessary. And I was able to use the packing cubes (multiple sizes of mesh zipper bags) to help keep things organized, and allow me to pack one small bag at a time instead of a whole suitcase.

The easiest place to start was to pack the things I wouldn’t need to use in the next few weeks, like the travel-size Waterpik, and the long skirt, and the foldable water bottle (why did I think I’d need such a thing?). And then I added in socks and underwear to fill out the bag, and because I remembered my high school friend (the one I’m going to visit in Israel) telling me about a long trip she took where she made sure to pack thirty pairs of socks for thirty days (her father owned a sock store), I threw in a few extra pairs of socks, for luck.

            I knew I couldn’t pack my prescription meds until the last minute, especially because I’d decided to go with the strictest recommendations, which said to bring the actual bottles instead of pre-packing pill cases and bringing the prescription labels, so I typed up the (also recommended) list of all of my medications, and doses, and doctors names, and phone numbers. And then I filled a pill case with all of the over-the-counter medications I might need on the trip (allergy meds, Tylenol, probiotics, etc.), and labeled each compartment so I wouldn’t accidently confuse the Benadryl with the probiotic. And then I packed an empty day-by-day pill case, to fill once I get there. The very specific, and endless, rules around how to pack medications and liquids make me worry that if I do something even a little bit wrong, I’ll be arrested and accused of drug trafficking, because I am clearly planning to smuggle anti-depressants and thyroid medication to sell on the black market in Tel Aviv.

            By the time I’d finished practice packing the meds, and the liquids (in flexible silicone bottles that came with their own labels too!), I was exhausted, but at least I had a better idea of what I’d forgotten to buy (the Ziploc bags), and I’d resolved some of the conundrums I’d left hanging for months (should I bring the prescription bottles or just the labels and a pill case). I just took a few more minutes to shove a few outfits into my suitcase to see how much would fit, and then I declared myself finished.  

            It still doesn’t feel real that I’m going to be in Israel in a few weeks, though. Just like it doesn’t feel real that all of the living hostages are finally home. It takes me a long time to process things like this, and it doesn’t help that I’m already seeing reports about Hamas reasserting itself in Gaza, and killing their Palestinian enemies in the streets. I’m also not hearing much optimism about Hamas actually returning all of the bodies of the murdered hostages or agreeing to disarm. But I can’t do anything about that, or about many of the other things that are causing me so much anxiety, but I can pack my suitcase, and unpack it and repack it, and make sure I have enough socks and Tylenol and shampoo to make it through my trip. For now, I guess, that will have to be enough.

“You could order more chicken treats. I’m sure that would make you feel better.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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A Pupdate for the New Jewish Year

Posted on October 11, 2025 by rachelmankowitz

            Over the past year, Tzipporah had successfully mastered the art of peeing and pooping on the wee wee pads; we had to throw out a few rugs early on, and do a lot of scrubbing, but eventually we figured out the right number of wee wee pads, at the right strategic places, to make the whole thing work for her. But then, a few weeks ago, she started to leave tiny pee puddles in my bedroom, out of nowhere.

            I was 95% convinced that she was using her pee as a form of criticism, rather than having a health problem, because I noticed that the pee puddles only seemed to appear when there were no more treats left. So, if I took a nap during the day and didn’t remember to put a Greenie in front of the air conditioner, there might be a pee puddle by my door when I woke up, and if I set out a trail of chicken treats at bedtime, but failed to refill it at some point during the night, there might be a pee puddle on my path to the bathroom in the morning.

“Oops.”

Then, one night, while I was sitting with her in the living room, Tzipporah suddenly got up, walked across the room, and disappeared down the hall. I sat very still, in shock, wondering if she’d forgotten I was there, because in her almost-a-year of living with us, she has never gotten out of her bed while I was in the room with her, let alone walked brazenly across the room. When she returned to her bed, I snuck a peek into the hallway and saw that she’d left a poop on the wee wee pad. Good girl! I cleaned up after her and praised her and gave her a treat, dizzy with the belief that we were finally turning a corner in our relationship. But the second and third time she left the room, she went straight to my bedroom and used my rug as her bathroom, overcome with a bout of diarrhea. It’s a cheap rug, so I wasn’t overly upset about that, but the spark of joy I’d felt when I thought she was making progress was immediately flushed down the toilet.

            It turned out that during her evening strolls through the apartment, she’d been eating whatever she could find on the floor, whether it was a piece of onion dropped during the preparation of dinner, or a piece of the Siberian Iris leaves Mom was using for weaving. Once we figured out the cause of the problem, we were able to keep the floor safer for her, and the diarrhea and the pee puddles quickly disappeared.

            The truth is, though, that she really has been making some progress. She’s become much more present during her once-weekly therapy visits, lifting her head and looking around the room instead of hiding under my elbow. And she’s gotten used to the routine of sitting in the backseat of the car with her seat belt on, and then walking towards the door to be detached and picked up. Most of the time she practically jumps into my arms, whether we’re on our way into therapy or on our way home.

And she has started to express herself more forcefully with me, pawing at my hand when she thinks I’m brushing her hair too much, giving me the evil eye whenever I go near her tail with the comb. She was already letting loose with a bark or two each night, at Grandma, when the treats came too slowly, but recently she actually barked at the TV, pacing back and forth and yelling at a man on the screen, though I wasn’t there in person so I have no idea who she was barking at or how much he deserved it. I still only get to see her adventures when Mom can record them for me, since Tzipporah’s law against leaving her bed while I’m in the room came back into play as soon as her belly problems resolved.

            My big hope is that while I’m away in Israel, in a few weeks, she will realize that she can run freely around the apartment without fear of running into Mommy, and then she’ll get so used to her freedom that she won’t want to relinquish it even when I return. It’s my dream, anyway, and I’m allowed to dream. I mean, if peace can come to the Middle East, surely Tzipporah can figure out that I’m not all that scary. Right?

“Mommies are so needy.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Did I Survive the Jewish High Holidays?

Posted on October 4, 2025 by rachelmankowitz

            Just barely.

            This time of year is always a challenge for me, with choir rehearsals and synagogue school starting and then high holiday services one after another. I had to skip the Tashlich service – the one dogs are invited to because it’s at a pond instead of indoors – because I was wiped out after the first (three hour) service of the day. And then I had to leave early on the second day of Rosh Hashanah too, because I was afraid if I stayed much longer, I wouldn’t be able to drive home safely. Mom was sure people would assume it was her fault we were leaving early, but she was ready to stay until the bitter end. I was the weak link.

            This feeling, that I am at my breaking point so much sooner and so much more completely, is frightening.

            Listening to the shofar blasts was more meaningful this year, somehow. The strangeness of the sound – not music, but not not music either – connects us back to our ancestors, who used ram’s horns to be heard over the din of the crowd. Each prayer on this holiday seems to bring us back to a time in Jewish history, really. We say the Acheinu prayer for the wellbeing of the Israeli hostages, but the text was written millennia ago, when Jewish hostages were taken by ancient enemies and redeemed by the Jewish community at whatever cost, and the music connects us to yet another Jewish community in the more recent past, so that we can feel our ancestors in the room with us from every direction.

Tzipporah is waiting for her ancestors to visit the apartment, with treats.

            The aging of our congregation was more obvious this year, with all of the walkers and the rollators and the shuffling and the rounded shoulders, but it was good to see the congregation filled to the rafters (literally, we had people up in the choir loft, which is never actually used for the choir). We were only filled to the brim for the first day of Rosh Hashanah and the morning of Yom Kippur, but still, it was nice to see.

            I’ve gotten used to the presence of the security guards at the front doors now, and the locked doors, and tinted windows, and bollards to prevent car rammings, but it’s hard to settle into the reality that we really do need all of those measures because there are people who actively want to kill us.

            And then, of course, I caught a cold on Yom Kippur. Mom was sure that my allergies were kicking in, because the heat had gone on overnight for the first time, swirling dust every which way, but as the day went on my symptoms worsened until it was obviously more than just allergies.

Surprisingly, though, with all of that, the Yom Kippur services were easier than expected. The rabbi’s speech, Against Despair, helped a lot. We started the day with the news about the attack on Jews entering a synagogue in Manchester, England, so despair was sitting in the room with us, but the hope the rabbi tapped into wasn’t about how things were going to turn around and love would prevail, instead he told us that the Jewish people have survived through one devastation after another, outliving enemies time after time, just by the commitment to life.

            The other highlight of Yom Kippur, for me, was a prayer I must have heard many times over the years, but it hit me differently this time. It’s called Shma Koleinu (Hear our Voice), and in our synagogue it is sung as a solo by the cantor. It’s a simple plea for God to hear our suffering, and to hear our pleas for help, and I always forget how healing it can be just to be heard, even when no material help can be offered.

            Hear our voice, God, spare us and have compassion on us and accept our prayers, mercifully and willingly.

            I went looking for this prayer on YouTube and found a lot of versions, including a few with the same tune we use (by Max Helfman), but none of them captured the power that our cantor was able to create with those same notes. Technically, I think its because he chooses to stay in chest voice instead of switching to head voice for the top notes of the cry, so it sounds more like a cello than like a violin; the fullness of the sound, rather than something more piercing or fragile, implies that we deserve to be heard by God. It’s not a desperate plea, instead we’re calling out, through our cantor, to say that we need help and respect at the same time.

We feel like we walk through the world without leaving a ripple in the fabric of other people’s lives, and while that’s never really true, it feels true, when no one stops to tell us that we’ve been heard.

            Singing with the choir, even though it takes a lot out of me, gives me the opportunity to be heard and seen, and to feel like an essential part of my community. And we all need that feeling. We all need to feel like our presence matters and our voice counts to someone other than ourselves.

            There’s a reason why Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are the big communal holidays in Judaism, and it’s not because they are the only holy days on the Jewish calendar (there are kind of a lot). It’s because they are the hardest. We are meant to spend this time searching our souls for the sins we’ve committed, and, like chimps carefully picking bugs out of each other’s hair, this awful task is much easier to do with company. When we cry out to God and express despair, at least we aren’t doing it alone, because to do such a thing alone would be to risk truly falling into a pit of despair where the monsters have free reign.

            We do all kinds of things to mitigate the despair of looking so closely at our lives and at what we need to change in the coming year: we find beautiful music to set our prayers to, we dress up, we prepare more deeply and for a longer period of time, and we come together. And then, we stand together and pray for long periods of time, listing our sins and our flaws and our fears, but we do it together, in the light of the synagogue, rather than alone in the dark.

            And when we cry out to God, we are also crying out to each other: Hear me and I will hear you, and together we can make sure our lives matter, at least to one another.

Shma koleinu by Max Helfman – sung by Cantor David Rosen – https://youtu.be/ijAuDvzVmfw?si=RSsIoxhpiXJUkeCT

“Next year, can I sing too?”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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