WEAVING A JEWISH COMMUNITY
Alissa J. Stern

When I first considered weaving with preschoolers at Gan Hayeled Nursery School at Adas Israel Synogogue in Washington, D.C., I thought about how to engage the children in the process of weaving. I focused on the universality of looms and weaving, and tried to connect the children to an art that spans generations and cultures. It was only after working with the preschoolers to weave a tallit, however, that I realized that we were learning more than how to make cloth: we were learning how to create Jewish symbols that helped us to place ourselves in a uniquely Jewish tradition.

Initially, I had wanted to help the Gan students become part of a universal weaving tradition. In the first group projects, I and used their old t-shirts and baby blankets cut into strips instead of regular yarn to connect the children more personally with our project, which was to be a wall hanging for the school. The children were quick to make a connection: they anxiously pointed out their individual contribution and typically recounted where their particular t-shirt was purchased or how it got stained. Several realized the implications of recycling the shirts, likening theirs to plastic bottles that are made into park benches. Few, though, said much of anything about the wall hanging itself: it many ways it remained a collage, a collection of individual bits of cloth, never a whole new fabric.

The process of weaving, however, was a clear collaboration. Teams of four students wove together, eight hands operating as a single weaver. One child would pull a lever; another would stick his t-shirt strip through the open shed (affectionately known as the train tunnel), a third would grab the strip on the other side (often "Choo-choo-ing" to hold up her end of the train) and a fourth would pull the beater to squish the new strip against the others already in the warp. When they were in synch, the foursome could weave at a pretty good clip, periodically shouting "Clear!" to warn each other to clear the way before the beater caught unsuspecting fingers.

Not surprisingly, the children were attracted to the myriad of colors and pointed out the patterns made by the intersection of the warp strings with the t-shirt warp. They noticed how the harnesses went up and down when the levers were pulled and observed the functioning of the loom's gears. They marveled how a single machine could produce fine lace or heavy rugs and wondered how the loom was more or less the same in different countries, regardless of differences in culture and language.

That first year was a good experiment, and the Gan children produced a lovely hanging for which they felt proud. They learned some new techniques and adorned their walls with something they could return to, years after they graduated from preschool. Something changed the next year when we decided to weave an oversize tallit. The children stopped talking about their own contribution, their bit of shirt. Instead, they started talking about the textile as a whole, and ascribe communal ownership to it. The conversation moved away from random comments about the origins of their t-shirts or the pleasantness of a particular color to what it is like to be a weaver, particularly a Jewish weaver, creating something uniquely Jewish as previous generations across the world had done before. It was in that second year that I realized the importance of the loom as a tool to introduce children into a Jewish way of being, not just a machine for making cloth.

"We're weaving a tallit just like Rabbi Wohlberg's!" One preschooler excitedly exclaimed. "But who will wear it?" wondered another. "We are making just one and there are lot of us." "We will all wear it," responded a third. "It will be all of ours." Suddenly we were making more than a wall hanging. We were making something they had seen in synagogue, something that could be used for prayer.

They questioned whether the rabbi had woven his own tallit and wondered whether it was woven on a similar type of loom. They pondered how the tzitzit would be attached and what all the twists and knots could possibility mean (a topic of still of some debate). Their discussion was part of that larger question of what Judaism meant for them and how they figured into it. In many ways, they were weaving more than a tallit: they were weaving themselves into their Jewish community.

This year, when pondering what to weave, the set of choices was clear, something Jewish: a torah sash, a bima cover, a parochet, a challah cover, a Shabbat tablecloth. In the end, we wove a torah cover. "Let's put it near the tallit" suggested one child who remembered weaving the previous year. "That way, we can put on the tallit when we carry the torah." Connections, symbols, affirmation: their tallit, their torah cover, their weaving, their religion, their Jewish community.