Our Summer of Tkhines

With Marna Sapsowitz and Sharon Power

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A rabbi and a Yiddish teacher walk into a Zoom room…

In the summer of 2023, rabbi and Yiddish student Marna Sapsowitz and Yiddish teacher Sharon Power decided to put together a khevruse to explore something new to them: Tkhines, supplicatory prayers in Yiddish written for women to recite privately on a variety of occasions. Together with a dozen or so of their Yiddish-loving friends and students, they met on Zoom to read and discuss a wide selection of Yiddish tkhines for topics ranging from candlelighting and challah, to the High Holidays, to getting married, to innovative American tkhines for the Titanic disaster or for immigrants who hear bad news from the Old Country.

In this presentation, Marna and Sharon will discuss their experience of facilitating this unique khevruse and share selections of some of these remarkable prayers in both Yiddish and English.

This program will be in English, with readings in Yiddish and English translation.

Marna Sapsowitz lives in Olympia, WA. Most of her professional life has been as a congregational rabbi; now she works as a hospice chaplain.

Sharon Power is a Yiddish teacher and translator in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. She currently teaches the online Intermediate-Plus and Advanced Yiddish language classes for the UJA Committee for Yiddish.