The Entin family is deeply enmeshed in the Judaic fiber of Phoenix, so heading to shul for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is just another thread of their family life.
Rabbi Isaac Entin is principal of the Phoenix Hebrew Academy, a Jewish day school for kindergarten through middle school. Dvora Entin is coordinator of Aleinu (Hebrew for “it is our responsibility”), the Jewish Family and Children’s Service program that offers resources for strengthening individual and family life in a culturally sensitive fashion to ensure the comfort of the Orthodox and all others members of the Jewish community. They attend Beth Joseph Congregation with their children Yummy, 15, Ezra, 13, Naava, 6, and Tehilla, 3.
Her husband leaves early in the morning for holiday services.“I follow later when I can get the kids rallied and ready to go,” Dvora says. During years when child care isn’t available, she prays at home. But she enjoys going to the shul for tefillah (prayer) because she enjoys Beth Joseph’s songs of the prayers, which are reminiscent of the melodies she grew up with in Baltimore. “Also I enjoy integrating something for the family; every holiday brings something interesting into the home,” she says, noting she has a box of items for each Jewish holiday. “I have my Rosh Hashanah box for me to carry things forward from year to year. I recently found beautiful apple napkin rings.” She likes to add items to her holiday box that make the holiday “pleasant in our home as well (as in shul).”
She says her children enjoy having “a lot of company” for Rosh Hashanah dinners. Honey is a prominent feature in the Entin home at every dinner from Rosh Hashanah through Sukkot. Dvora likes finding new varieties of honey, which have included an assortment of floral honeys and even eucalyptus honey.
“I enjoy setting out all the different honeys. It enhances the experience. It’s not just about dipping apples in honey,” she says, noting her children also put honey on challah and other foods. “It’s something else to make children more engaged in the holiday.”
Dvora also looks forward to making her mother-in-law’s honey cake and round holiday challah, to which she adds cinnamon and sugar instead of raisins, which she personally doesn’t like. Her husband usually makes a brisket on the smoker for holiday dinners.
Traditional and symbolic foods – such as the head of a fish, pomegranates and carrots – can help families add meaning to the holidays. She says the idea of eating from the head of a fish reminds us “we should be leaders in our community and the world.” The multitude of seeds in a pomegranate are reminders of the 613 mitzvot. The words “carrot” and “decree” have the same Hebrew root (gezer), “so when we eat carrots it is to say negative decrees are null and void, and positive degrees shall be enacted.”
Symbolic foods as an integral part of the Rosh Hashanah dinner is customary in most traditional homes, says Dvora. “There are prayer-like statements that go along with each of the different foods, and everyone gets to sample the foods and say the prayers together.” “Anything that makes children interested is valuable,” she says, noting children enjoy the symbolic foods. Additionally, she says, those symbolic foods help us “focus on our connection to G-d and our spiritual relationship with Hashem.”
