With Cloth, Thread And Needle Comes The Fabric Of Jewish Life
The Age
Wednesday March 19, 1997
THE YEAR Melbourne hosted the Olympics was the year of the Suez crisis. It was also when couturier Leon Haskin made the Gown of the Year, which was photographed by Athol Shmith.
That gown and the photograph are on show at the Jewish Museum in St Kilda, along with items that came to Australia after the Suez crisis. It was in 1956 that the Jewish community of Cairo was given a fortnight to leave the country that had been its home for centuries. They were allowed to take a little money and a suitcase or two. And what did they take in their suitcases? Most took books and textiles, says Naomi Cass, curator of the exhibition, Material Treasures, from the collection of the Jewish Museum, which opened yesterday.
It includes pieces that are the fabric of life - of love, grief, celebration, and ceremony. Material Treasures honors an antique and living tradition, and pays tribute to the skills of ordinary women who did extraordinary things with cloth, thread and needles.
The huge, lavish cloth that is hung at the entrance is the result of 1200 hours of stitches; a stunning piece of conservation by the Embroiderers' Guild that comes from the Ottoman Empire and was probably made in the 19th century. It is perhaps a parokhet, the decorative curtain that covers the ark where the scrolls of the Law are kept in a synagogue, or it might have been a curtain that separated the men and women of the congregation.
The exhibition begins with an avenue of parokhets, from different times and countries, all made in the spirit described in the Bible, which gives "very clear and beautiful instructions", as Naomi Cass puts it, for the cloths to beautify the Tabernacle.
"To beautify a textile is an act of honoring God," says Cass.
Many of the parokhets (or parokhot, in Hebrew) are made from recycled clothing - dresses that have been cut up and stitched into a new shape with a new meaning. Not always dresses; sometimes curtains, sometimes even men's clothing.
There is a parokhet known as Napoleon's (not in the Melbourne collection), because Napoleon gave his jacket to a Jewish soldier who cut it up and used it for an ark curtain. Cloth usually moves up the ceremonial cycle, and once it has moved up, it attains an indestructible dignity. Jews are forbidden to throw out ceremonial objects; they must be buried (which was how many of these textiles survived).
Cass's favorite piece is one of the most moving. It is a simple white linen Torah cover, edged with a distinctively Greek pink satin, with a silver embroidery inscription around the satin edge. The inscription is partly in Greek. It was made by a man called Salemus, who was probably from Salonika, which was very much a Jewish city until World War II, when the Jewish population of Greece was almost entirely exterminated. Salemus gave and dedicated the Torah cover to the synagogue in honor of his son who died in 1944.
"Can you feel the man pushing the thread through for his son?" Cass asks.
Also included in the exhibition is a wall hanging made in 1939 by Rachel Federbusch, a detailed work with tiny figures - lions, dancers figures, farm workers and animals, a Union Jack, a ship and a butterfly (an emblem of escape). The English inscription reads: "S.O.S. All I pray for is to rescue my aged mother of 76 and my brother of 50 from stricken Vienna. Please help me. Rachel Federbusch 9.vii. 1939." It was found in her sister's house in Melbourne after her death.
"Textiles are where the family value is," says Cass. That is why the families leaving Cairo took such things as the lace they had made, and the garments that had been made for baby boys' circumcision ceremonies.
Dresses in the exhibition include the 1956 Gown of the Year and two wedding dresses, one Yemeni and one Australian. The Australian dress was worn by Esther Solomon at her wedding in Melbourne in 1883.
There's not much that's distinctively Jewish about the wedding dresses, or even in some of the ceremonial textiles that originated in the Ottoman Empire and that are embroidered with the imagery common in Islamic communities.
"Very often you can't distinguish between Jewish and Muslim objects, because when you're comfortable you don't need to identify yourself or to be identified," says Cass. "There was a free flow of imagery and means between Jewish and Muslim communities."
"Jews were in textiles to ensure the correctness of following the laws. Dyeing was often a closely guarded secret within Jewish families," Cass says . All of which helps to explain why so many Jews were involved in the rag trade, whose best modern expression is in that 1956 Gown of the Year.
There's also history in the peculiarly Jewish artful textile known as Spanier arbeit, Spanish work, which must date from the centuries-long Jewish presence in Spain that ended with the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. It was used mainly for the neckband of prayer shawls and for skull caps, and involved wrapping silver and gold thread around cotton cords, using embroidery and weaving techniques.
"These textiles are noisy," says Cass. "They speak loudly of women's work and spirit, and how they held families together and how they held communities together. I'd like this exhibition to incite a revival of the crafts."
Material Treasures is at the Jewish Museum, 26 Alma Road, St Kilda, until 1 June.
© 1997 The Age