A kaboles shabes celebrating Yiddish
By Rabbi Gabrielle Pescador
In March, the Ann Arbor Reconstructionist Congregation offered a Yiddish kaboles shabes (Kabbalat Shabbat/welcome Shabbat Friday evening service). The service was created in collaboration with Elena Luchina from the UM Frankel Center for Jewish Studies Yiddish Language Program, Mischa Shwardon from the Yiddische Gas (Yiddish language study group), and musicians and Yiddish enthusiasts from the AARC community. Together, we wove a Friday night experience that celebrated spiritual tradition with Yiddish ancestral history and culture. We were especially excited to bring multiple communities together to open our tent to new people, new voices, and new energies.
Shared language of sound
We began the service and set the tone for the evening with “Shnirele Perele,” a Yiddish niggun (wordless song) whose name evokes a “stringing of pearls,” a traditional rabbinic way of linking verses across our sacred writings to illuminate deeper meaning. The song reimagines this sensibility as a collective yearning for the coming of the messiah. In a Reconstructionist (and broadly contemporary) frame, we read this not as a literal arrival, but as a longing for a more whole and just world.
The musicians were central to shaping the emotional arc of the service, and worked together in rehearsal to find a shared language of sound and klezmeric feeling that blended traditional davening tunes and Yiddish melodies: Debbie Gombert on accordion and flute, Sue Merritt on clarinet, Laurie White on guitar, Seth Kopald and Margot Neuhaus on percussion, Isaac Meadow on piano, and me on the harp.
AARC member, Danny Steinmetz, contributed to the service with a meaningful dvar Torah.
Emotional archive
Yiddish carries within it the emotional archive of the Jewish people: the humor, the ache, the resilience of everyday life. Bringing Yiddish into Kabbalat Shabbat blurred the boundaries between the liturgical language and structure of the service and the lived experience of carrying Ashkenazic heritage in our bones.
Songs like “Ikh Zing” flowed into “Yedid Nefesh,” highlighting how, in rabbinic imagination, romantic love between two human beings can serve as a metaphor for entering an intimate relationship with the Divine. The Yiddish love song, from the 1938 musical Mamele, became a doorway into such mystical longing.
This theme came into even sharper focus as we welcomed the Shabbat bride through “Lecha Dodi,” set in part to “Chiribim” and the melody of “Tumbalalaika.” Elena Luchina offered a beautiful teaching on “Tumbalalaika.” She explained that it is a song of courtship not centered on wealth or status, but on affinity. The beloved is the one who understands your riddles, who meets your cleverness with their own.
As we turned to greet the Shabbat bride, this reframing felt especially resonant. The encounter with Shabbat became relational. It asked not what we have, but who we are, and whether we can meet the sacred with presence, curiosity, and depth.
Devotional prayer
We also introduced the congregation to t’khines, personal devotional prayers historically voiced by Jewish women in Yiddish. In a world where many women were not taught Hebrew or given access to formal liturgical language, t’khines offered a way to express concerns of everyday life in the vernacular — prayers for children and family, for health, livelihood, peace, and protection.
In this service, a t’khine accompanied candle lighting, inviting the light to enter not only our homes but our hearts. Later in the service we offered a t’khine published in 1916 in Antwerp, for an interpretive Hashkiveinu (prayer for protection), asking to be sheltered beneath Divine wings, free from fear and suffering.
For the Amidah, I offered a Rabbi’s t’khine extending the tradition forward, in which I asked for blessings for the community, invoking ancestors, and widening its concern to include all who are vulnerable: across nations, across divides, across the fragility of ecosystems that sustain life on this planet.
Honoring tradition/celebrating culture
What emerged was a vision of Shabbat that is deeply collaborative, participatory, and evolving, one that honors and revives tradition, and that celebrates the art of Jewish cultural history.
The response in the room was palpable. Some people had tears in their eyes, moved by the ache of memory and nostalgia carried in the Yiddish language and melodies. Others spoke of a sense of joy that lightened the heart, especially during these difficult times.
In bringing together Hebrew liturgy, Yiddish song, and t’khines, the service expanded the emotional and spiritual range of Kabbalat Shabbat. And perhaps most importantly, it reminded us that prayer is not only something we inherit — it is something we create and recreate together, like Shnirele Perele, stringing pearls.
About the AARC
The AARC is a caring, inclusive and music- and art-loving community of people who want to practice and study Judaism, or simply be around people who share a commitment to Judaism’s values. The AARC’s spiritual leader, Rav Gavrielle Pescador, is known for her warmth, her collaborative spirit, and her incredible voice and harp playing. You are invited to visit https://aarecon.org/ or email [email protected] to learn more about the Ann Arbor Reconstructionist Congregation.
