Last Day of the Sukkahs
[nggallery id=”36876″ template=galleryview] Sukkot, the seven-day Jewish festival with origins as a celebration for the harvest, is ending today. One of the icons of Sukkot is the sukkah, a temporary hut built just for the week of Sukkot, reminiscent of the structures the Israelites built during their 40 years in the desert, following their exodus…
[nggallery id=”36876″ template=galleryview]
Sukkot, the seven-day Jewish festival with origins as a celebration for the harvest, is ending today. One of the icons of Sukkot is the sukkah, a temporary hut built just for the week of Sukkot, reminiscent of the structures the Israelites built during their 40 years in the desert, following their exodus from Egypt. Here, we’ve put up ten iPhone photographs we took while biking around in Crown Heights and Williamsburg, home to large Jewish populations. You’ll notice that Jews carry around leafy branches and lemons with them during Sukkot. These come from a commandment from Moses: “On the first day you shall take the product of hadar trees, branches of palm trees, boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God seven days”.
nice celebration, in the northeastern United States, Jews commonly hang dried squash and corn in the sukkah to decorate it, because these vegetables are readily available at that time for the American holidays of Halloween and Thanksgiving. Building and decorating a sukkah is a fun, family project, much like decorating the Christmas tree is for Christians.
Those balconies in Williamsburg and Boro Park are built for the purpose of putting up a sukkah. You’ll notice that they’re not directly beneath one another — the sukkah needs to be open to the stars, so they’re staggered so you can see up to the sky (through the branches) in at least part of it. It’s a big selling point in Brooklyn to have space for one’s own Sukkah.
What a brilliant idea for a piece. Hope next year you get to it sooner! And fuller coverage!
The building in the first picture clearly has fire escapes attached to it and would appear to be an older apartment building and not a condo development. That would make the shack above the entrance a bit of a problem assuming that is also a fire escape with a scuttle ladder.
I think those balconies may be what are illegal. I think zoning set a limit to the depth of balconies.
i’m pretty sure that the ridiculously out of scale cantilevered balconies you see in the hasidic areas of williamsburg are made specifically so religious families can set up their sukkahs for sukkot.
THANKS FOR POSTING
THANKS FOR POSTING
aj- not in today’s construction but in older construction if you had sprinklers you didn’t have to have an external fire escape. (straight from the FDNY’s mouth).My reply was to ou who thought the balconies were fire escapes. And the picture above- to which we were both referring- has balconies and fire escapes. Although I have been in buildings that did have both sprinklers and a fire escape such are the vagaries of NYC architecture 🙂