Photo Blog #28: My Culture

Every Friday night, my family and I eat dinner together to welcome Shabbat. This ritual is called kiddush. First, we light two candles to symbolize the bringing in of peace and light into the home. Then, we say a blessing over two special braided loaves of bread, called challah. The challah are covered with a cloth, and we say the blessing thanking God for bringing bread to our table. After eating a piece of the bread, we say a blessing over wine or grape juice. In this picture, you can see a silver kiddush cup that was given to me by my grandmother on my Bar Mitzvah. The design is unique to the Jews of Iraq. The bird on the lid, the shape of the cup, and the engravings on it are not used in any other Jewish communities. The Babylonian Jews lived in Iraq for nearly two thousand years, before the were violently expelled from their homes in the years following 1948.