Banging in Jerusalem

We woke up late this morning to the sound of hammers clanging on metal. Not that it's so unusual to hear banging and building as it seems that everything here is constantly under construction. One of our upstairs neighbors has been doing renovations on his apartment since we got here 16 months ago. He has yet to move in and every time I ask him how things are going, he gets a glum, consigned look on his face and mumbles something about the latest set of problems. In that time, four apartments in the building have had major renovations. Our street, which is thankfully about 100 meters from us, got partially ripped up and repaired - all of which happened between 1-5 am. So we are used to hearing banging.

But today was a little different. It's the annual day-after-Yom Kippur sukkah building fest. A sukkah is a temporary dwelling that Jews build once a year to remember our time in the desert after the exodus. Their are some pretty complex rules for building it, and one of the important ones is that it can't be built with anything immediately above it that could act as a roof. That means that new buildings in Jerusalem are built with offset balconies so every balcony has a least one full floor of empty air above it. This allows people to build a kosher sukkah on their balcony.

For people who live in older buildings, with balconies one above another, this poses a problem. So every year, our neighbors race out to our front courtyard to try to get the best places for their sukkahs. (Mind you, both of our bedrooms overlook the front courtyard, and we could hear people arguing about the best ways to put up their sukkahs until 10pm last night!) As Jews are supposed to sleep and eat all their meals in the sukkah for the eight day holiday, people tend to build big sukkahs to fit their family and all their guests. So things get a little tight in the limited green space. But the rest of the requirements are the easy part.

A number of years ago, my friend Mark and I broke his circular saw while making a sukkah out of 2x4's. We took some scrap rope, scrap lumber, and trimmed some of his trees and bushes to cobble together a fairly good sukkah, though we did end up tying it to the side of his garage so it wouldn't fall over. (Which in my book, makes it a real temporary dwelling!) We had some good meals there, though I don't know if anyone actually ended up sleeping there. Jerusalem in October is a lot warmer than Boston!

Here is Jerusalem, if someone wants to put up a Kosher sukkah, all they need to do is walk down the street to "Acme Glatt Kosher Sukkahs" and buy one. That's right, within a five minute walk from the house, there are two different tents that set up in the past two weeks selling instant sukkahs. They sell the frame, cloth for the walls, "s'chach" for the ceiling (looks a lot like a bamboo mat), they will roll it all together for you, and I think they'll even deliver. Very entrepeneurial! And gives a whole new meaning to the term "tent sale!"

On Sunday, Silvia's gan is going on a field trip to one of the kid's parent's sukkah, and I think they are going to go to several others. We are going to be in Ranana this year for sukkot, so we are going to eat at a friend's sukkah while there. Maybe next year we'll build our own as I have fond memories of making lots of decorations when I was a child. If we can, we'll send some pictures. We'll see what we can find.