The Magic of Mezuzahs

The Hebrew month of Elul—currently winding down—is a time of reflection, repentance, and spiritual preparation for the new year. Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, is also known as Yom Ha’Din, the Day of Judgment, and European Jews didn’t hesitate to get all the help they needed in advance of that judgment. Part of the spiritual preparation of Elul was a ritual of visiting the graves of the ancestors, in Yiddish called “geyn af keyver-oves.” If the new year was a liminal time, the cemetery was the Ashkenazi Jews’ preeminent liminal space. The folk religion of the people reflected an intuitive grasp of the magical potential therein.

The relationship between heaven and earth was dynamic, and required regular maintenance, to the benefit of both the living and dead. The living did good deeds to aid the souls of the dead in their ultimate ascension, and the dead could act as intercessors in the heavenly court of judgment. If this sounds uncomfortably un-Jewish to you, you’re not alone. For example, R. Meir of Rothenburg, a 13th-century rabbinical authority, was harshly critical of these visits to the cemetery, saying that only “a dog lies on a grave” and instead of going to the cemetery, Jews should “pray directly to God as did Abraham.”

Asking the dead for help might have been distasteful to R. Meir, but when it came to the war on demons, he was all in, and his weapon of choice was the humble mezuzah. The great historian Joshua Trachtenberg quotes R. Meir in his masterwork on the subject, Jewish Magic and Superstition: “If Jews knew how serviceable the mezuzah is, they would not lightly disregard it. They may be assured that no demon can have power over a house upon which the mezuzah is properly affixed. In our house I believe we have close to 24 mezuzot.” One wonders if this was actually a flex on the demons or a humble brag on the surprising number of doorposts in his home.

What exactly was it that spurred R. Meir to such lengths in his fight against the unseen forces of evil? Trachtenberg goes on to cite Solomon Luria, who recalls that R. Meir vanquished an evil spirit that tormented him during his noontime nap, “but not any longer, now that the mezuzah was up.”

R. Meir’s mezuzahs speak to European Jewry’s complex negotiation of the borderlands between magic and “religion.” Hundreds of years before R. Meir was just trying to take a nap, the Jews of Babylonia were fighting off demons and curses with a kind of amulet known today as an incantation bowl. Ordinary clay bowls would be inscribed in Aramaic and buried, bowl side down, in key places—most importantly, at the threshold to the home.

The desire for magical protection at the threshold is widespread and deeply rooted. Trachtenberg classifies the mezuzah as an amulet “despite rabbinic efforts to make it an exclusively religious symbol.” Indeed, he writes of the mezuzah that in “the Middle Ages, it is a question whether its anti-demonic virtues did not far outweigh its religious value in the public mind.” In that period, Ashkenazi mezuzah scrolls were still being inscribed with various angel names, kabbalistic diagrams, and other magical signs. Even if the average Jew didn’t know anything about Kabbalah, they understood the power inherent in sacred words and names.

In Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe, the mezuzah’s magic lent itself to a variety of new healing practices, many of which are described in Marek Tuszewicki’s excellent Frog Under the Tongue: Jewish Folk Medicine in Eastern Europe. In one, a child with whooping cough would stand at the threshold, by the mezuzah. An incision would be made in the doorpost above the child’s head and the illness was supposed to pass once the child was taller than the incision. In another, the husband of a woman experiencing difficult labor would chant the haftarah by the mezuzah, along with an incantation, to ease her labor. And, of course, the imperative to “check your mezuzah!” when an illness befalls a home, or khas v’sholem, a whole community, survives into our own day.

If mezuzahs were once carriers of powerful protective magic, today, they are amulets of a different kind, bearing our complicated, global Jewish identities, in styles from kitsch to high art. But in modern-day Warsaw, mezuzahs are performing a different kind of magic, one that bridges the chasm between presence and absence, and between contemporary Poland and the global diaspora of Jews of Polish heritage.

Mi Polin, the self-proclaimed “first Polish Judaica company since World War II,” specializes in mezuzahs. Not just any mezuzahs, though. They search out the traces of prewar mezuzahs, make bronze casts of doorway imprints, and in a bit of artistic alchemy, turn those traces into new mezuzahs, each one elegantly inscribed with the address where the trace was found. The result is nothing short of stunning.

Mi Polin was founded in 2014 by co-owners (and good friends) Helena Czernek and Aleksander Prugar. Both are 30-something with artistic backgrounds. Czernek was a freelance designer and Prugar was a photographer, though neither had any experience with Judaica. One of the first products they designed was a transparent mezuzah for the blind, made of crystal. It featured the word Shaddai, one of the names of God, written in Hebrew Braille. After that came the decision to make bronze castings of doorpost traces.

I recently spoke to Prugar and he told me about the history of Mi Polin and how they are combining design, history, genealogy, and photography.

The purpose of Mi Polin was never to simply lift mezuzah traces for raw material to be used elsewhere. As Prugar told me, “Every trace of a mezuzah we find is documented by us in order to rebuild the fate of the former owners of the mezuzah. Thanks to the documentation, we can … meet the former inhabitants of houses with prewar mezuzahs. We restore their memory because most often they were ordinary, unknown people.”

After being in business for 14 years, Prugar and Czernek have just opened Mi Polin’s first physical location, in Warsaw. Why? Over the last 12 years, Prugar said, the two have “driven 60,000 km, visited five countries, 160 cities and villages, and discovered 170 mezuzah traces.” In the process, they’ve collected “a huge amount of documentary materials. As he told me, “our database of mezuzah traces is probably the largest in the world,” and includes 5,000 photos. The center is a place to house and display the materials they’ve collected and the mezuzahs and other objects they create. But it is also a museum and educational center, especially for their non-Jewish, Polish audience.

As we approach the Jewish New Year, I think about my own ancestors and how they valued their ongoing relationship with those who were gone. To them, the cemetery wasn’t a place where the dead kept their silence, but a meeting spot, where messages could be passed between worlds. The work of Mi Polin echoes that dynamic. “Back in the day,” Prugar told me, “there were millions of mezuzahs in Poland. Along with the memory of their owners, they vanished during the war. Mezuzah traces are letters from the past, which we read as follows: We, who were murdered in the Holocaust and are no longer here, your old neighbors, whom you will never meet, or members of your family, with whom you will not coexist, we leave something behind, a way to find us in the future. We leave you mezuzah traces.”

Mezuzahs: You can find Mi Polin at their website and excellent Instagram account.

ALSO: The Workers Circle will offer a virtual, secular Rosh Hashanah program with readings and music from Zisl Slepovitch, Deborah Strauss, and Cantor Jeff Warschauer, and more. Oct. 3 online. Click here for more information … The Brooklyn Klezmer Trio offers a “blend of traditional klezmer and innovative improvisation” from some of the best young musicians on the scene. The Trio is Ilya Shneyveys (accordion) Sarah Myerson (poyk, voice) and Jake Shulman-Ment (violin) and they’ll be at Barbes on Oct. 9. More info click here.