Nostalgia Sunday – Yemenite Embroidery

February 15, 2009 - 10:14 PM by Rachel Neiman

Back in the early Sixties, most kids’ mothers wore frilly cocktail aprons to entertain. Not my Israeli mother. Hers looked like this.

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And her miniskirts and pantsuits looked like this.

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My mother, a singer of international folksongs, had a great collection of gowns. Many were created at Esther Zeitz, a Jerusalem house of fashion that employed a team of Yemenite seamstresses that sat, day in and day out, stitching threads of silver and gold onto splendid garments. Who needed jewels when you had something like this bedecking your neck?

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Wearing Yemenite embroidery was very cool among Israeli women who came of age during the 1940s and 50s. This dress was made for my mother when she was a teenager during the 1948 War of Independence.

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In the Sixties, after the 1967 war and the reunification of Jerusalem, she combed the Old City looking for a velvet jacket with Bedouin embroidery to wear over a black velvet gown. She found one, too.

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In the early Seventies, she scored some Bedouin-style embroidered garments from the Arab Women’s Union of Bethlehem, an embroidery cooperative.

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But my favorites will always be the Esther Zeitz outfits. As I recall it, Zeitz – whom I remember as a large woman with swollen arms – closed down in the Eighties when she became too ill to manage. It would be nice to find out more about what happened to the workshop, which was located at the junction of Ben Yehuda and Bezalel streets – I think it is a hairdressers’ today.

My sisters and I wore many of these garments during the Go-Go Eighties. Today, however, they are fragile – the polyester fabric is forever but not the cotton threads that hold down the metallic threads. We are not sure what will happen to this collection, and so decided to document the clothes that, for us, are part of a happy memory.

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Tags: , , , , , , , • Category: Art, General, History and Culture, Nostalgia Sunday, Profiles, design 

Comments

2 Comments on Nostalgia Sunday – Yemenite Embroidery

  1. jessica on Wed, Feb 18th 2009 9:11 PM

    2. okay, i wore those dresses by esther zeitz, when i was about 6 and 8, or maybe 4 and 6. why twice? because i had two older sisters, and they had matching esther zeitz dresses, in blue, with that heavy silver embroidery, and i hated them…and yet, i had to wear both of them when i hit each size. and my mother would say, “but their esther zeitz dresses, they’re beautiful!”

  2. Miri on Wed, Feb 25th 2009 11:01 PM

    3. Beautiful embroidery…you’re totally right-who needs jewels with those wonderful necklines.

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