Buongiorno Yom Kippur

just to get started, if you read my past post about me being scared by a statue/man on the main piazza, he was there again and I got a picture. Wouldn't you have been freaked out too? 

Hi!
(warning, beyond the picture above, most people will probably find this post really boring, but this is one of my dorky history/Jewish moments)

So this weekend was very interesting. The rest of the group left for gorgeous Lake Como and I remained in Verona (really not bad) Friday started Yom Kippur (Jewish Holiday) so I decided to stay and attend the synagogue here. I had a good experience on Rosh Hashanah, although difficult so I knew generally what to expect, but it was still hard both being away from home and not having any of the other girls here. It was nice though to be able to again return to something familiar, as the the prayers and tunes for the most part were exactly the same as at home. I saw some of the same people also that I had met on Rosh Hashanah and it was nice that they remembered me. The whole point of Yom Kippur is that you are supposed to remove yourself from your daily life and really reflect on things that you have done in the past year that you are not proud of and try to make amends as well as look into the future. I must admit that I had a lot of difficulty doing this ( for example last year computer science test, day after Yom Kippur couldn't think about anything else) Here was cool because I was actually very removed from all of the people and things that are "normal" to me, this really allowed me to have a good amount of reflection on my life and where I am headed and I was really happy about that.

 Overall, there were only two things that were different traditions here that I found really interesting. One is that multiple times throughout the services on Saturday, at the conclusion of different services, everyone got up and got in groups based on their families (we were sitting separate men and women) the father then took his Tallit (prayer shawl) and wrapped it around the entire family. The rabbi then said a prayer. A really nice man who I had been speaking to came over and put his Tallit over me, since his family wasn't there and he knew I was far away from home. He later invited me over for dinner and to babysit his four kids (even though I know zero Italian) .

The other interesting tradition I noticed was about the Torah, but first let me sidetrack. Often in services (from my perspective) there is supposed to be this build up before the ark (the cabinet which holds the Torah) is opened and then the Torah's are there and it should be almost glowing (I don't know where I got this idea from) anyways, at home when the ark opens its cool and all, and the decorations are nice, but I never had a "moment," here I had a moment. I had pondered how many Torahs were in this ark. It is a really small but old community (by the way Torahs are really expensive and there are a lot of rules about how a Torah must be written and conserved for it to remain Kosher) The ark opened and there were 6 Torahs in there! If that wasn't exciting enough (to me only probably) but the decorations on the Torahs were really old looking (I am guessing a couple hundred years) that is when it really hit me where I was and how cool this experience was to actually witness the survival of Judaism and tradition for hundreds of years. Okay I am probably getting sappy/ to excited about history for most people but moral of the story I really enjoyed it.  Okay, back to the other tradition, the Torah had the metal decorations as well as the typical cloth cover, but it was also bound together by a cloth almost like a scarf that was wrapped around it. After the Torah had been unwrapped a woman took the cloth that had wrapped the Torah. She began to roll it, and passed it around so all the women got a chance to help roll it up. I really liked this because although women are not allowed to read Torah or be up on the bimah here, they still got to be connected in a way to the Torah.

Anyways, because of the extremely extensive description of yesterday a quick  summary of today: lots of walking around, people watching, almost falling asleep from one glass of wine, reading and general relaxing. Oh and I totally broke the fast last night with nutella gelato, delicious but all I wanted was lox and bagels and my mom's kugel. To my dismay my italian roomate informed me that they do in fact make bagels here, and sell them in every grocery store, missed that.

Oh, and only one more week of Italian immersion...thank goodness

Ciao!