My first recollection of wearing a special embroidered blouse was at a Simchat Torah parade as a 5-year-old at the former Beth Am Center on Burleigh Street.
My Great Aunt Pninah Grad in Israel (my maternal grandmother’s sister and aunt of my mother, Doris Gendelman) had made and sent two blouses, one for me and one for my younger sister, Beth Rattner.
How proud I was, maybe smug as well, realizing the embroidery in the blouse was like the flag I was carrying — rows of blue and white.
Over the years, from that far away place where lived uncles, aunts and cousins we hadn’t yet met — there came handmade fabric treasures with that precise, crowded, intricate stitching we call Yemenite embroidery.
Pninah Grad was born approximately 1900. Along with her seven other siblings and her parents, she immigrated to Palestine after World War I from Galicia. She became an art teacher and taught legions of children the secrets and discipline of beautiful stitches.
We can assume many young European women like her had known the basic stitches, and recreated and reorganized their skills to execute them in a new way in their adopted land, reflecting what their Sephardi sisters introduced.
It gave me a sense of continuity when as a teacher at the Milwaukee Jewish Day School, I was able to share some of these stitches with interested students at lunch hour.
I finally saw Pninah in Israel in 1968 on my first family trip, where I spied a wonderland of tablecloths, soft toys and clothes adorned by her handiwork.
A few years later, on a trip I promised myself after graduate school, I ended up a very sick traveler accepting the offer of my kind aunt to recover on her couch.
She entertained her ailing patient with stories prompted by her legendary shmata collection, and also instructed me in sewing numerous stitches by making a sampler. It is one of my most prized possessions.
Some of the blouses and the small but perfect stitchery sampler she made for me are a part of an exhibit at the Wisconsin Museum of Quilts & Fiber Arts titled “In Stitches: Embroidery and Needle Arts,” running through July 12. All varieties of needlework, including an exhibit of items from the Florence Eiseman Company, are on display.
In the 1950s the “secret” airlift called Operation Magic Carpet brought 50,000 Jews from troubled Yemen to Israel. When the first of this persecuted minority began trickling into the holy land in the 1880s, they brought with them their rich cultural heritage in arts and crafts.
The new immigrants, notable craftsmen and women, continued creating distinctive Yemenite filagreed jewelry and the similarly ornate style of embroidery, which for many years defined an Israeli style. How many of us have beautiful Eilat stone filagreed broaches or a tallit bag with this extraordinary stitching?
Today, most Israeli souvenir shops that we recall from years ago do not have new Yemenite jewelry, and only carry machine made embroidered cloth items. The places to find these handmade items are in the antique shops. There are very few craftsman left who are using this skill.
Some of the embroidery was quite ornate for ceremonial events, using silver and gold thread, and metal sequins and beads. The infusion of this style found its way to everyday collars and cuffs as added embellishment.
Melded with sewing handiwork already known by other immigrants , this kind of stitchery added a finish to often plain clothes worn by newcomers to then-Palestine.
Most of the stitches are not unique to the Yemenite culture. What makes Israeli Jewish embroidery distinctive is how it picks up the flavor of the Arab countries, where it is prevalent in all populations, in the close arrangement of parallel rows of clusters of tight stitches and arrays of combinations echoing especially necks and other edges.
There have not been many opportunities for a Jewish presence in American museums dedicated to needlework. It gives me great pleasure to have had these pieces of Jewish history accepted for this Wisconsin exhibit as a teaching tool about a small part of our Jewish artistic heritage. Pninah would be smiling too.
The museum is located at N50 W5050 Portland Rd. in Cedarberg. It is open Wednesdays to Saturdays, 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Sundays noon-4 p.m. For more information and to arrange for a docent tour, call 262-564-0300 or visit WiQuiltMuseum.com.
Nina Edelman is the librarian emeritus of the Milwaukee Jewish Day School. When not quilting she is traveling and rescuing interesting fabric pieces.
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