The calendar may have flipped to September, but in many parts of America, summer lingers on with a vengeance.
“It’s a little hectic; there’s a lot going on,” says Tova Rapoport, co-director of Chabad of Atlantic County, N.J., and Chabad at the Shore. “Summer is our busiest season, and this year the holidays fall on its heels,” with Rosh Hashanah beginning at sundown on Sept. 4.
It was a busy August for the Rapoports, right up to the end of the month. On Aug. 11, Chabad held its Jewish festival on the beach, attended by nearly 600 people. On Aug. 22, they hosted their big gala dinner for 250 people. Early last week they offered a shofar factory for kids, and on Friday, as she does all summer long, Rapoport ran three back-to-back challah-making workshops under an outdoor tent, mainly for tourists and families with second homes at the shore.
“My children all work together with us. It’s a family effort, and that helps a lot,” she says. She and her husband, Rabbi Shmuel Rapoport, have been on shlichus for 28 years. They have 14 children, ages 6 to 31. So when does she get a chance to decompress and find her own spiritual enrichment before the holidays in the midst of such activity?
“I teach a women’s class once a week, and when I prepare for that class I have time to think, to reflect, to get as much out of it as possible. It’s based on the weekly Torah portion, but when the holidays come up, we talk about that.”
Honey Cakes and High-Altitude Challah
Chana Wilansky, co-director of Chabad Lubavitch of Maine with her husband, Rabbi Moshe Wilansky, was in the process last week of making 150 honey cakes. She says their calendar was going out in the mail and her holiday meals were being planned out—all in the middle of guests continuing to arrive for end-of-August vacations.
“It’s still warm, it’s still summer here,” she says of Portland, where she has lived for 26 years. “It gets busy right after Tishah B’Av. Lots of vacationers have been coming; they’re still traveling right before the holidays. They spend the weekend at Acadia National Park, then come here before or after for Shabbas, for a kosher meal and minyans.”
Shevy Kaminetzky, co-director of Chabad of Taos for the past five years, says she’s trying to do as much as she can in advance of the High Holidays, cooking and freezing and working very hard to make challah, which can be difficult in New Mexico. “There’s a very high altitude here—7,000 feet—and it does something funny to the baking.”
She normally uses pre-made dough in typical challah form, but for Rosh Hashanah she makes it from scratch to shape the traditional round challah, and works to get it to rise properly.
She’ll also have to work a little harder than most logistically. Their shul, where they will hold their Rosh Hashanah meal for about 25 people, is about an hour’s walk from their home. So she and her husband, Rabbi Eliyahu Kaminetzky, and their three small children are planning to stay at a hotel for the holiday and then walk back home for Shabbat. Being in her third trimester, she expects the walk will take a bit longer.
She plans to run a children’s program with a helper, and she recently held a pre-holiday Jewish Kids Club activity picking apples in an orchard and making arts-and-crafts shofars. She doesn’t have to buy new clothing because “it’s very, very casual around here and still really hot. In fact, where I live, there’s almost no shopping. You have to go to Albuquerque to shop.”
In the midst of all this, “I guess I don’t make my prayers a priority. I focus entirely on the children and the food setup.”
Pausing a moment, she adds: “But my husband has me in mind. And G‑d understands my predicament.”
Call in the Volunteers
Nechama Eilfort, co-director of Chabad at La Costa, Calif., with her husband, Rabbi Yeruchem Eilfort, says that as far as the holidays go—and every other day of the week—“we manage to pass the torch, pass the hat, back and forth between each other.” That’s how their household, with eight children, runs efficiently.
But that wasn’t always the case. Eilfort, who has been married for 25 years and been in California for 24 of them, relates that years ago, when their children were much younger, the two got into an argument. She wanted to know when she would get to pray during the holidays, and who would watch the kids? She said her husband responded that they weren’t holding a children’s program that year and so she didn’t have to watch any kids.
Then, she said, “the light bulb went off in his head.” Their kids. And he responded with: “Oh my gosh, we need volunteers!”
Since then, she says, they have mastered “the concept of delegation.” These days, volunteers will cook certain foods to help out, and the children, who now range in age from 7 to 23, will pitch in and make different salads. Her husband does the cooking most nights since she started teaching outside the home, and knows his way around the kitchen as well. She says locals request his spaghetti and homemade sauce, and he makes a “mean salad dressing.”
And yes, Eilfort acknowledges: “Sometimes, you find someone who makes a better chicken soup than you do.”
This year, to compound the stress, says Eilfort, their shul is under construction, so the cooking is being done in their home. The Rosh Hashanah dinner guests have been limited to 60.
In terms of personal reflection, Eilfort tries to squeeze in a daily walk before she wakes her family at 6 a.m. When her kids were babies, she found some prayer time while nursing.
But as was noted again and again, davening takes a back seat for mothers and wives—and even rebbetzins—when their children are small. They try to find room for at least one or two prayers, and they say one day, it would be nice to be a “regular person at shul.”
Still, they realize that the kids will grow up, and the women will get that time back. And that the holidays will arrive at the door, whether or not everything is perfect or ready. They will arrive, even if the challah doesn’t rise.
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