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When there were Jewish holidays a few Jewish friends came to my place. I also invited some Serbs and it was all very interesting to them. My mother insisted on that. I used to take my friends to the synagogue, too.
We didn’t eat kosher. Saturdays my grandmother went to synagogue with my mother, I never went. Mother always said, “You want, you don’t want, you do not have to.” They went early in the morning, that is why she said to me “you sleep, we are going.”
My grandmother and my mother used to say some sort of prayers for Shabbat, I remember that there was some sort of prayer but I forgot. And some other prayers. For Yom Kippur I used to bring some special fruit for my mother and grandmother, because they were fasting, and that fruit used to help them to go through that day more easily. I didn’t fast, my mother would give me money to buy a sandwich to eat outside the house. After Yom Kippur, in the evening, we would all gather, the whole family to have dinner together. It didn’t matter if somebody fasted or not, the point was to get together for Yom Kippur. I remember a prayer, a part of it “… el melech haolam, shma Israel.…” My grandmother taught me that.
My favorite holiday was Christmas because of the presents and the Christmas tree. All children love that. For Christmas, we were always invited to friends’ houses who were Christians, as they were coming to our house too when we were celebrating our holidays. We hardly ever celebrated Purim, for many reasons but mostly because there was no man in the house. I know that both the Orthodox and the Jews say that when a man dies, all of that disappears, too.
We didn’t eat kosher. Saturdays my grandmother went to synagogue with my mother, I never went. Mother always said, “You want, you don’t want, you do not have to.” They went early in the morning, that is why she said to me “you sleep, we are going.”
My grandmother and my mother used to say some sort of prayers for Shabbat, I remember that there was some sort of prayer but I forgot. And some other prayers. For Yom Kippur I used to bring some special fruit for my mother and grandmother, because they were fasting, and that fruit used to help them to go through that day more easily. I didn’t fast, my mother would give me money to buy a sandwich to eat outside the house. After Yom Kippur, in the evening, we would all gather, the whole family to have dinner together. It didn’t matter if somebody fasted or not, the point was to get together for Yom Kippur. I remember a prayer, a part of it “… el melech haolam, shma Israel.…” My grandmother taught me that.
My favorite holiday was Christmas because of the presents and the Christmas tree. All children love that. For Christmas, we were always invited to friends’ houses who were Christians, as they were coming to our house too when we were celebrating our holidays. We hardly ever celebrated Purim, for many reasons but mostly because there was no man in the house. I know that both the Orthodox and the Jews say that when a man dies, all of that disappears, too.
Location
Serbia
Interview
Livia Teleki