Tag #116566 - Interview #87373 (Berta Finkel)

Tradition was observed very strictly. We didn’t work on Saturday. On Friday evening, if we wanted to have heat, we always called someone over, my parents gave them something in return, and they lit the fire. Christians lived nearby, and they came over. Or on Saturday morning. During the week, I would sometimes light the fire, or my mother would, or my father. And my mother prepared soup, meat for the lunch on Saturday, and someone would come, light the fire, and we heated the food on the kitchen stove. That’s how it was back then.

My mother lit 5 candles on Friday evening. [Ed. note: It is customary to light two candles, although some families light more, sometimes in accordance with the number of children.] When father returned from the shul, we, all the children of our household, would sit down to eat, and mother served soup, meat, what she cooked in advance. My mother baked bread every Friday. We had an oven when we lived in Sulita, and she baked homemade bread. It used to last us for the whole week, and we didn’t buy bread from the bakery. For Saturday and holidays, she baked kneaded bread, colilici. [Editor’s note: Coilici is a variant for challah, similar to the word “kajlics” used by some Hungarian-speaking Jews in Romania. Both words have the origin of the Hungarian word “kalacs”.