* This humour essay was published in snippets on the Huffington Post, and full on Shtetl Montreal, a radio show and website with fun, new-Jew twists.
Dressing-Up for Shul: A nostalgia essay
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When I was a kid, my mom — a converted shiksa with blond hair and a southern drawl — would have me and my sister Alana model our synagogue best, from orange gingham jumpers to plaid blue kilts with white turtle necks, weeks before the Jewish high-holidays. If the clothes didn’t fit, she’d scour the shops for new ones. She wanted us to look “appropriate” for synagogue, as she called it.
A woman of details, mommy would also inspect our white stockings for runs and make sure our black and white saddle shoes were polished. Then she’d also take us to get our red hair freshly trimmed into bowl cuts, and have the beautician scrape all the specks of dirt from beneath our fingernails.
I assumed that mommy was so obsessed with us looking appropriate because she looked and sounded so different from the other women at our modern Orthodox shul (‘synagogue’ in Yiddish) in Montreal, where the congregation just stopped short of traditions like top hats and wigs.