newjerseynewsroom.com

BY JEANETTE FRIEDMAN

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

In recent weeks, New York Magazine featured Sukkah City — a green, architecture contest for the most interesting Sukkah. The winning designers work was showcased for two days last week in Union Square Park. The huts now have a home on the web, where they are on exhibit with many more innovative designs and interesting information about them. (www.sukkahcity.com)

A sukkah is a hut Jewish families build in observance of the current holiday Sukkot (Tabernacles). It celebrates the new harvest and the exodus from Egypt — a reminder of the transient life and the need to keep an eye on your food supply. Observant families eat all three meals in these little buildings, and some even sleep in them. The temporary structures come in all shapes and sizes and are often colorfully decorated with hanging fruits, foil decorations, paper chains, religious posters, rug hangings and more. Some are all-year round rooms that are part of a house and have removable roofs. Some are simple and seat no more than two people. Some are so elaborate, they have crystal chandeliers and heating systems with automatic awnings to keep out the rain. Synagogues and temples build huge ones for their congregants, and sometimes neighbors build a Sukkah together. As religious articles, the huts conform to certain rules which include not using any nails and making sure you can see the sky through the plant material you are using for your roof.

Three days after Yom Kippur, the solemn Day of Atonement, this joyous seven-day festival begins...and ends with yet another holiday, Simchat Torah, that celebrates the cycle of reading the Torah (the Jewish Bible) each year. In the three frantic days after Yom Kippur, people feverishly work to build and decorate their huts. And casual observers can see them popping up like mushrooms after a rain in backyards, back decks, balconies and terraces all over the Garden State — in Teaneck, Englewood, Livingston, Lakewood, Fair Lawn, Clifton, Passaic, Englewood and other neighborhoods where Jewish communities thrive. People driving through these areas often wonder at these strange little houses with bamboo, evergreen boughs or swamp grasses used as roofing. Today, most sukkot (plural of sukkah) are made of canvas or nylon fabric stretched across metal supports, with bamboo poles or bamboo matting laid across the top.

In the old days, in the '50s and '60s in Brooklyn, and even before that, most sukkot were made of old wooden doors scavenged from apartment buildings that had been renovated. They were screwed together with nuts and bolts, with furring strips laid across the top to support evergreen branches or marsh grasses. These sukkot were a rickety business, and a strong wind could knock them right over. A blast of air coming through the cracks would often blow out the holiday candles, and sometimes we could hear fire engines heading to a neighbor's house to put out a fire that started when the candlesticks were knocked over.

Food would be brought down the stairs to the yard, wrapped in towels to keep it hot. Sometimes ingenuity was used, and women who lived on upper floors created their own silent butlers by tying baskets to some rope, and lowering their meals down through the kitchen window. The process involved lots of yelling and spilled soup.

Of course, the menu was usually the same everywhere. After the sanctification of the wine, challah bread and apples were dipped in honey as a harbinger for a sweet year. Gefilte fish, a quenelle of white fish and carp, would be served with horseradish, followed by hot chicken noodle or matzoh ball soup that had pine needles or bits of marsh grass floating in them, depending on the roofing matter. Then came a roast chicken with sides of potato or noodle pudding or both, honey glazed carrots with raisins, and apple sauce with honey cake for dessert.

As you drive around your community and wonder about all those blue and yellow shed-like structures, think about what it must have been like 2,500 years ago, when the Jews wandered through the dessert with their portable little huts and harvested their crops in the Land of Milk and Honey. Know also that the people who are building them here in New Jersey love America and the freedoms it offers, for in their own parents' lifetimes many were not permitted to remember their past in such a happy fashion. It's why Sukkot is known as "z'man simchateynu," "the time of our joy."