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The Trip to NYC:
Yom Kippur, Food, Fun, & Family Tradition
By Rebecca Lasky

For nearly 12 years, my father and I awoke extra early on a Saturday morning and traveled to New York City from Manalapan, N.J. This wasn’t just any old, run-of-the-mill trip into the big city. Nor was it to visit his office in Manhattan, which he used to do often enough as I was growing up. Oh no, on this day, the trip was to get food for a very important Jewish dinner: Yom Kippur.

Yom Kippur is the Jewish day of repentance with its central theme being atonement and reconciliation. Things such as eating, washing, cosmetics, wearing leather shoes, and marital relations are prohibited. Total abstention from food and drink usually begins half an hour before sundown and ends after nightfall the following day. Although the fast is required of all healthy adults, fasting is specifically forbidden for anyone who might be harmed by it.

The first time my father decided to take me along for the trip I was about 9 years old. At this point in my very young life, it would be an insult if he’d put me into a stroller, so I had two choices in keeping up with him: gigantic steps that made me look silly or scampering steps that appeared to anyone else that I was running to stay by his side. Then there was my favorite option, “Daddy, up!” complete with raised arms, a pout and puppy-eyes. It never failed until we actually had the food. By then he would give me a look that clearly said I’d be carrying the bags if I didn’t walk.

So we would leave the house around 5:30a.m. and drive into the city. I had never been a great travel companion without eating something before hopping into the car, but he always assured me that we’d grab something to eat as soon as we arrived in the city. I would, of course, whine and complain and usually turn a not-so-pretty shade of green just before we got to our first destination—Katz’s Delicatessen in the lower East side. We’d order our breakfast, I’d de-greenify, and then we’d leave to hit all the stores we needed to hit before mad rushes of Jews flooded the streets to hit the same stores for their own Yom Kippur meals. At some places, if you had not preordered what you wanted, you waited on a line that twisted and turned in the shop then winded out the door and to the sidewalk, usually mingling with another line.

Whenever Yom Kippur fell on a weekend, without fail, my father would wake me in the morning and we would climb into the car. When my brother was old enough, or my mother got tired of having him in her hair early in the morning, whichever story you want to believe, he would join us. I would get the front seat mind you. There have been a few times when Yom Kippur fell on a weekday, so my father would get the food alone but every time it fell on the weekend, sure enough, I was in the car with him.

I’m going to be 21 this year and even if I’m in school, I go home the night before to make that special trip into New York with my father and brother. This past year my grandparents joined us, and even though it was drizzling and a little chilly, we still went to Katz’s and then charged up and down the streets in an earnest attempt to beat the crowds. I look forward to this holiday, not so much for the fasting but for the trip the day before and the time I get to spend with my family. Sometimes it’s great to be a Jew.

Rebecca Lasky is a freelance writer for Curious Parents.