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Community Corner

Local Jewish Moms Seeking Kosher Family Relationships

Although she and her family stopped keeping kosher, Sandy Sondell of Wayzata believes God's Yom Kippur judgment Friday will be based on attitude and gratefulness, not perfection.

“There are three kinds of Jews,” according to precocious 13-year-old Ethan Meirovitz, a student at the Heilicher Jewish Day School in St. Louis Park. “Religious Jews, cultural Jews, and gastrointestinal Jews, Jews who just love the meals.”

“I’m all three,” he said. And so are most Jewish moms.

The honey-sweet wishes of the Rosh Hashanah new year, celebrated by Jewish families last week, gave way to this week’s 10 Days of Awe and fasting. It’s the last chance to relinquish sin and mend relationships during a season of self-examination and fasting that ends as Yom Kippur commences sundown Friday, a holy judgment deadline.

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Yet while synagogues direct Jewish worshippers in holy confession, Jewish mothers interviewed in the west Metro area raised their own humble Yom Kippur question: “Am I sufficiently honoring my heritage, and effectively passing on to my kids what is most sacred?”

For Jewish moms that involves family and food. As the keepers of culinary propriety, holiday embellishment and the kitchen hub of family relationships, some this week needed to reflect on and reconcile the past with the present.

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Historically Jewishness was most visibly shown by keeping kosher, something with which Sandy Sondell of Wayzata is very familiar.

Sondell openly wrestles with the fact that after seven years of keeping kosher in her marriage, it finally ended.

“Initially, it was hard for me," she explained. "In college and for all my life I’ve kept kosher. No shellfish or pork, for example."

“But the hardest thing was finding a large enough section of kosher chicken, hamburger and other meat,” said Sondell. “Of course, a year after we stopped keeping kosher, they began carrying it at Costco and Trader Joe's!”

Sondell’s family goes to the conservative Adath Jeshurun Congregation in Minnetonka, where some families continue to religiously separate foods. “Others keep kosher at home, but not outside of it,” she said.

Yet Sondell never asked herself why she was keeping kosher, she said. “That was just part of being Jewish.”

Sondell takes her faith seriously. She pulled out her prayer book to share the alphabetized inventory of sins she and others at Adath will confess on Saturday: “We abuse, we betray, we are cruel, we destroy, we embitter, we falsify…”

Yet she believes that God’s judgment will be more about her attitude and intention to be a faithful mother and Jewish woman than about impossible attempts at perfection.

“Then I sat down to think about it, and my husband asked why we kept kosher, mostly because he wanted cheese on his tacos,” she laughed. “I explained I don’t think that it’s something God would be displeased about. Rules about eating are more for my sense of belonging and my sense of knowing and thinking about what it means to be Jewish.”

The orthodox, of course, disagree. Holiness is absolute in the family of Janie Buchbinder of Darchei Noam Synagogue in St. Louis Park. Meticulously attending to the Torah’s 613 commands, they will leave their lights on through the night Friday, as they do each Sabbath, so they don’t have to “work” or lift a finger to adjust them, and so nothing interrupts their devotion.

Darchei Noam worshippers see keeping kosher as a matter of unquestioned obedience.

“What kind of year you’re going to have is written in the Book of Life on Rosh Hashanah and sealed on Yom Kippur," said Buchbinder. "We are continually asking forgiveness. When the gates close on Saturday, you will hear crying and wailing in our synagogue.”

Laura Smith of Minnetonka recalls a golden era in her childhood.

“My grandmother had eight different sets of beautiful silver dinnerware in a china cabinet, fully lined in green felt from floor to ceiling," she said. “You had separate milk and meat dishes for normal days, milk and meat dishes for Sabbaths, and milk and meat dishes for the holidays. But it was grand and it set the tone for how special the holidays were.”

Food restrictions are the most debated among the 613 commandments, considered by many too challenging and impractical to keep in a busy secular world.

But parents seeking to “make memories” in the lives of their children have a sinking feeling that something dietary and daily was lost.

When she was approached for an interview, Smith nearly declined, emailing, “As I read through your questions I was saddened to think that our family does not have any ‘rituals’ that we follow annually. We thoroughly enjoy the Jewish holidays, but I don’t feel that we have enough to share.”

Yet one day recently, something new happened with her 11-year-old daughter Lily, she explained at her dining room table.

“Lily was looking in the cabinet and asked, ‘Mom, what do you use this for?’ And I said, ‘That was grandma’s silver bowl,’” taking out the tarnished dish."

Smith explained what grandma used her dishes for and how she would shine them. Then she added, “In fact, it needs to be cleaned. And Lily said, ‘Well, can we clean it?’”

“I planned to polish only the bowl, but two hours later we were having a great time together,” said Smith.

"In fact, when Jewish friends mentioned that their silver needed cleaning she said, “Lily loved doing ours so much, bring it over!”

All three mothers say prayers with their children, light candles and make weekly challah, the classic braided Sabbath bread.

“My goal for my kids is that they appreciate every day what they have, who they are, and how they got here,” said Sondell.

That’s better caught than taught, the mothers implied, and in no better way than in the kitchen with their Jewish relatives for the high holidays.

“We got together four times to cook as an extended family for the holidays,” said Sondell. “Once to make the soup, once to make kreplach (a meat inside dough) to drop into the soup, once to make (ground) Gefilte fish, and another time to make (potato turnover) knishes.”

It may not be a time of reconciliation in the synagogue, but the family bonding sure seems holy, especially when you incur the wrath of the bubbies (grandmas) for how you rolled the dough, laughed Sondell.

“After that, the kids play Wii but at least they are with us,” she said.

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