A ‘yankee Tallit’ Designed for Bicentennial Celebration

The Bicentennial celebration has inspired products galore. There is something for every person’s taste, whim and sentiment at prices ranging up to thousands of dollars. But now along comes an item specifically designed for the observant Jew who may want to combine prayer with a subliminal reminder of America’s 200th anniversary: a Bicentennial “Yankee tallit.”

A new company, calling itself the Yankee Tallit Works, located in New York, is offering a tallit made of lightweight kettle cloth denim, braided atarah, orange decorative stitching and natural color fringing. A spokesman for the firm said the tallit “has 100 percent wool tzitzit (ritual fringes) tied by a carefully selected staff of men who meet the most rigid religious standards.”

He noted that the tallit, a matching kippah and appropriate tallit bags, which have been designed and introduced to the American Jewish public in honor of the Bicentennial, has “a uniquely American design.” It was also designed, he added, to attract younger people “who believe that prayer should and could be a less formal experience without having to deviate from tradition or halacha.”

AN EXCITING IDEA

Yaakov Gross, a graphics designer who designed the tallit, said the idea came about from a conversation he had with two friends, Haim Plotzker, a Fordham University political scientist, and Bdya Arzt of the Women’s League for Conservative Judaism. They said there was a need for an American-designed tallit and Gross went to work on it. Plotzker is acting as production manager of the firm.

The first “Yankee tallit” was presented to Rabbi Alexander Schindler, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, according to the firm’s spokesman. The spokesman said that Schindler, upon trying on the new tallit, said it “is an exciting idea which should appeal to the young American Jew.”