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Sukkah
Origins

A look back in history
gives clues to today’s
modern sukkah.

An engraving of a sukkah by Paul Christian
Kirchner, published in 1717

Louis Finkelman | Special to the JN

Y

ou can learn how to keep kosher
from law books, but still not
know how to cook. So, too, you
can learn the rules for what makes a kosher
sukkah from law books, but still not know
how to build a sukkah. If you want to know
exactly how our ancestors built their suk-
kot, where can you look?
You could try looking at artwork. Starting
in the late 16th century, a few Christian
artists made engravings of their Jewish
neighbors celebrating the festival of Sukkot
(which starts this year at sundown Sunday,
Oct. 16). An observer with the right back-
ground could even compare those engrav-
ings with the legal writings to see what
opinions Jews followed in practice.
An ideal observer with the right back-
ground means Rabbi Dr. Daniel Sperber,
author of many books of Jewish scholar-
ship, distinguished professor of Talmud at
Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel,
who majored in art history as a young stu-
dent in England. Sperber, in volume six of
his eight-volume Hebrew work, “Customs
of Israel: Origins and History,” devotes his
attention to this age-of-enlightenment art-
work.
An engraving by Paul Christian Kirchner
in 1717 — like a similar engraving by
Bernard Picart in 1724 and many subse-
quent copies — shows a wealthy family of
Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam enjoying

42 October 13 • 2016

Bernard Picart’s engraving shows a sukkah with a brass chandelier, 1724

their festival meal in their sukkah. The gor-
geous sukkah has a porous roof, as Jewish
law requires, made of plant material (in
Hebrew, schach). Surprisingly, the roof takes
the shape of a dome.
Sperber also considers the descrip-
tions of sukkot in a book by Dr. Hugo
Mandelbaum (1901-97), Jewish Life in the
Village Communities of Southern Germany.
Mandelbaum was a professor of geology
at Wayne State University, also an artist,

Sukkot Primer

Beginning five days
after Yom Kippur,
Sukkot is named
after the booths
(sukkot in Hebrew)
in which Jews are
supposed to dwell during this weeklong
celebration. According to rabbinic tradi-
tion, these flimsy sukkot represent the huts
in which the Israelites lived during their
40 years of wandering in the desert after
escaping from slavery in Egypt.
The festival of Sukkot is one of the three
great pilgrimage festivals, along with
Passover and Shavuot — holidays set aside
for the people to travel to the Temple in
Jerusalem.
The holiday is also known as the “Harvest
Festival.” Much of the imagery and ritual of
the holiday revolves around rejoicing and
thanking God for the completed harvest.

mathematician and scholar of Judaica and,
for some years, principal of Yeshiva Beth
Yehudah in Detroit, before he retired to
Israel. His study of Jewish life in the villages
of southern Germany was part scholarship
and part memories of his own native vil-
lage, Geroda.
According to Mandelbaum, some houses
in Geroda featured an upstairs room, called
the oberstube, directly under an opening in
the roof. A corrugated metal sheet covered

The sukkah represents the
huts that farmers would
live in during the last hectic
period of harvest before the
coming of the winter rains.
The sukkah has at least
three sides, with a roof
made of thatch or branches, which pro-
vides some shade and protection from the
sun but also allows the stars to be seen
at night. It is traditional to decorate the
sukkah and to spend as much time in it as
possible. Weather permitting, meals are
eaten there; some people sleep in the suk-
kah. In a welcoming ceremony called ush-
pizin, ancestors are symbolically invited to
partake in the meals, too. And in commem-
oration of the bounty of the Holy Land, four
species of plants (palm, myrtle and willow)
known as the lulav are shaken in all direc-
tions together with a citron (etrog).
From MyJewishLearning.com.

the oberstube during the year; on Sukkot,
schach went up in place of the metal sheet.
People who built free-standing sukkot
in Geroda, though, had a different form of
construction: Young fir trees were chopped
down in the woods and the branches
were severed from the trunks, which were
sharpened at the lower end using a hatchet.
These “stakes” were driven into the ground
at about 1 meter from each other. A few
tree trunks were laid horizontally to join
the stakes together, to form a skeleton for
the walls and the roof.
An engraving by Johannes Leusden, pub-
lished in 1682, shows a round sukkah with
walls made of plant material, somewhat
similar to those of Geroda. Sperber notices
that in the Talmud, Rabbi Oshiah requires
that the walls of a sukkah, and not just the
roof, consist of plant materials (Sukkah 7b).
Ultimately, the opinion may appeal to a
biblical source (Nehemiah 8:15). Although
later codifiers follow the contrary opinion
that all materials are valid for the walls of
Sukkah (based on Mishnah Sukkah 1:5),
perhaps the Jews of Geroda intended to
fulfill both opinions. Some later codes do
recommend making the walls of the Sukkah
from plant material, and Sperber presents
record of Moroccan Jews who made their
sukkot of palm branches, similar to the suk-
kot of Geroda.
With Sperber as a guide, you can learn
a great deal about how to build a sukkah
from old artwork.

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