Ushering in the New Year
By Erin Smith
Brookline Tab Newspaper
Thursday, September 29, 2005


With heads bent and shoulders hunched over the kaleidoscopic strips of material, they tediously stitched together the fabric, week after week, for the past two years.

Enid Shulman shows off a panel of the Quilt she made showing her daughter, Sarah Strauss, holding a Torah. (Photo by Keith Jacobson).

But last Monday, after spending thousands of dollars on material and hundreds of thousands of hours stitching, the small band of dedicated tailors at Temple Beth Zion finally set down their needles and lifted their eyes to the temple walls. They sat in awe of the two towering quilts.

The quilt named "gevurah" represents dawn and strength, and the other, "chesed," illustrates evening, the start of the Jewish holidays. The quilts tell the stories of the sewers' personal connections to religion.

"We worked very hard. That's why I don't have any fingertips left," said Dorothy Kahane, who sewed eight hours a day for the past three weeks to patch the quilt squares together, just in time for the Jewish new year of Rosh Hashana.

The two quilts will join 50 other quilts created by various area religious groups next April at the Boston Center for the Arts in an exhibit of the Faith Quilt Project. Local artist Clara Wainwright started the Faith Quilt Project after Sept. 11, 2001, to create understanding and help people learn about other religions through quilts.

For the more than 30 people who worked on the quilts at Temple Beth Zion, the project also brought them closer together.

"You find that when you're sitting, discussing an 18-by-18-inch square, it becomes a very intimate and tender sharing on a creative level," said Beverly Sky, creative director of the quilting project at Temple Beth Zion and a local fabric artist.

Rebecca Zagorsky, a third-grader at Pierce School, received a big hug from Sky this week after she presented the patch of Noah's Ark she made with her mother.

The congregants also stitched their own personal stories into the fabric of the quilts. One woman made a square of the cycle of life, which included birth, B'nai Mitzvah, marriage and death. Another included in her patch a daughter who had moved away. One member who recently converted to Judaism crafted a pictorial of a woman rising from a river to symbolize a "mikvah," or the ritual bath she took before conversion.

One patch remembers Joe Wilion, a Holocaust survivor from Poland who died in the middle of the project.

The 91-year-old Wilion had talked about making a patch of the numbered tattoo that his sister was branded with at a concentration camp. After he died last October, Sky decided to make a patch dedicated to Holocaust victims and survivors, such as her parents, Wilion and his sister.

Sky began transferring Holocaust photos onto a special photocopy fabric. She selected the haunting faces of Holocaust victims and the large ovens used to kill them and stitched the circular pictures to her square.

When her friend saw her work, she cried.

"She said, 'Bev, there's no hope in this. You have to put hope in this,'" said Sky.

Now, rich green vines twist and curve between the photos. Sky said the vines represent growth and redemption after death.

The quilt began to take on a life of its own, as the group used old Torah covers and prayer shawls mixed in with the newer fabrics, said Sky.

Meredith Joy, organizational director of the Temple Beth Zion project, said she enjoyed working with the community, but is now relieved that all the hard work paid off after a long two years.

Said Joy, "I think they're [the quilts] so vibrant that it's really a reflection of everyone in this community."