Melon → millions
May it be Your will that this year we earn millions. No Hebrew necessary — equal-opportunity wordplay.
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A free guide from Our People · Jerusalem
How to Survive a Whole Month of Holidays — and not lose your mind
Rosh Hashana, the Ten Days, Yom Kippur, Sukkot and Simchat Torah. Twenty-five ways to make the holiday table the best hours of your family's year — plus the full simanim seder, 30 conversation cards and a challa recipe with no kneading and no braiding.
The guide · free PDF
Rosh Hashana begins on Friday night, 11 September.
Get the guide today and there are still three things you can do before the candles.
Get the guide today and there are still three things you can do before the candles.
Leah
Executive Director, Our People
Executive Director, Our People
I have sat at hundreds of holiday tables in Jerusalem, and the ones I remember are almost never the ones with the most beautiful dishes. They are the ones where a nine-year-old was allowed to run the whole simanim seder, or where a grandmother said out loud what she was hoping for this year and the room went quiet, or where somebody made a pun so bad that the family has been repeating it every Rosh Hashana for twenty years.
From the first candle of Rosh Hashana to the last dance of Simchat Torah is four weeks of cooking, hosting, apologising, fasting, building and singing, and somewhere in the middle of it every parent I know has the same thought at the same sink: I cannot do this again on Tuesday.
So this guide is built for the whole month, not for one night. Take one idea per meal and leave the rest. Nobody has ever remembered the food.
From the first candle of Rosh Hashana to the last dance of Simchat Torah is four weeks of cooking, hosting, apologising, fasting, building and singing, and somewhere in the middle of it every parent I know has the same thought at the same sink: I cannot do this again on Tuesday.
So this guide is built for the whole month, not for one night. Take one idea per meal and leave the rest. Nobody has ever remembered the food.
What's inside
25 ideas, arranged in the order things actually happen — the month before, the candles and the kiddush, the seder itself, and the long good middle of the meal
The Sephardi simanim seder in full: Hebrew with vowels, transliteration, translation, and the pun behind every wish
30 conversation cards to cut out and keep in a jar on the table
Leah's no-knead challa-ciabatta — no kneading, no braiding, almost no shaping, and the exact moment to separate challa
Every date of 5787 on one page, with one line on what each table asks of you
A one-page checklist for the whole month, to tape inside a cupboard door
Here is one of the twenty-five, in full
№14— And now, make up your own
After the traditional simanim, let everyone at the table invent one of their own. The worse the pun, the better the family tradition.
Pineapple, ananas → nisim, miracles
May it be Your will that this year we see miracles.
Corn, tiras → yitarsu, may they get engaged
May it be Your will that this year all our singles get engaged. Singles at the table, you have been warned.
Then pass the challenge around. Hebrew or English, profound or ridiculous. It turns the seder from something everyone recites into something everyone takes part in — and today's terrible pun may become the tradition your grandchildren insist on keeping.
Get the other 24 →Who made this
Our People is a Jerusalem-based organisation working with Russian-speaking families across Israel — some who arrived decades ago, many in the last two or three years, most of them with suitcases and very little else.
Their children are bright and funny and completely at sea. A great number of them have never sat at a Rosh Hashana seder in their lives, and have never eaten a meal in a sukkah. They know they are Jewish the way you know a fact about yourself that nobody ever explained to you.
We are the ones who set those tables. Holiday meals, camps, learning, trips, and the slow ordinary work of making a child feel they belong to something older and larger than the apartment they live in. Every idea in this guide, we are doing this month with children whose parents do not yet know how — and very often teaching the parents at the same time.
Their children are bright and funny and completely at sea. A great number of them have never sat at a Rosh Hashana seder in their lives, and have never eaten a meal in a sukkah. They know they are Jewish the way you know a fact about yourself that nobody ever explained to you.
We are the ones who set those tables. Holiday meals, camps, learning, trips, and the slow ordinary work of making a child feel they belong to something older and larger than the apartment they live in. Every idea in this guide, we are doing this month with children whose parents do not yet know how — and very often teaching the parents at the same time.
One thought before you go
Our Sages taught that whoever teaches another person's child, Scripture treats him as though he had brought that child into the world himself. Your responsibility does not stop at the edge of your own family.
This is the segula, if you want to call it that. Not a formula and not a guarantee, because our tradition is careful about promises — but a very old understanding that the blessing you want over your own table is drawn down by the tables you help set for others. And on Rosh Hashana of all days, we do not come to ask for a good year on the strength of our arguments. We come with our hands full.
This guide is free, and it will stay free. The tables are not. They are paid for entirely by people who will never meet these children.
This is the segula, if you want to call it that. Not a formula and not a guarantee, because our tradition is careful about promises — but a very old understanding that the blessing you want over your own table is drawn down by the tables you help set for others. And on Rosh Hashana of all days, we do not come to ask for a good year on the strength of our arguments. We come with our hands full.
This guide is free, and it will stay free. The tables are not. They are paid for entirely by people who will never meet these children.
Where should we send it?
Twenty-four pages, in your inbox in about a minute. Print it once and it will last you years of Fridays.
The guide · free PDF