Father stitches handmade bar mitzvah tallit with love

Silk and wool are only part of the fabric that weaves together the lives of Arnie Kamrin and his 13-year-old son, Rich. But what a handsome swath the blue and green silk makes against the wool in Rich's homemade bar mitzvah tallit.

Kamrin sewed and cross-stitched the body of Rich's tallit. He then invited family and friends to help tie the fringes. Kamrin followed the laws and customs of tallit-making, even using wool approved by the rabbis.

"I didn't want to just buy a gift and give a party," Kamrin says in his Los Altos backyard. "I wanted to give something that was a part of me, something that I created with my hands."

Kamrin considered various Jewish crafts possibilities. When he saw a handmade tallit at synagogue, Kamrin was inspired by its striking design, impressed at how much it differed from traditional tallitot he had seen,

"I'd just assumed a tallis is a tallis. I had one when I was bar mitzvahed; I now have my father's," he says. "They're normally either full-size or they're smaller, white with either blue or black, and they have the tzitzit and the prayer on them. And that's basically it."

Kamrin learned some of the rich textural possibilities open to modern tallit artists when he taught himself to make a tallit for Rich's sister Jackie, who became a bat mitzvah five years ago. Hers is made with pink silk. Her brother's has blue and green silk with a pattern of water drops across it. Both tallitot have special messages from father to child sewn in, as well as the traditional prayer.

It took less time to make the second tallit than the first, but Kamrin still spent a month and a half this past summer working almost constantly.

Kamrin was slowed by his own choice to include only stitches sewn with love. Any time a negative feeling or thought entered his consciousness while he was working, he would undo the most recent stitches and replace them with more soulful strokes.

"When I was doing it, it was like every spare minute that I had," Kamrin says.

"At every stoplight, he would do something," Rich adds.

"I had it in the car with me," his dad chimes in.

"Everywhere," Rich says.

Kamrin and Rich tend to weave together their sentences, just like the intertwined threads of the tallit. They're together much of the time -- Kamrin runs his restaurant equipment business from home, and spends a lot of his free time with his son. On this particular afternoon, they're smoking salmon together for a backyard barbecue.

The Kamrin men recently found their lives intersecting in an unexpected way: Kamrin passed his son's room one night as Rich was practicing his haftarah, and was surprised to find himself chanting along. As it turned out, father and son shared the same haftarah, though they'd learned it decades apart.

Several generations of Kamrins shared in the preparation for Rich's fall bar mitzvah at Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills. His great-grandmother, a survivor of San Francisco's 1906 earthquake, tied a portion of his tallit's tzitzit. So did Rich's grandmother and grandfather.

"It's almost a fabric of love," his father says. "When you put [the tallit] on, it almost feels like being hugged" by loved ones.

Rich's friends at Beth Am also helped tie the tallit. So did Rich's classmates: Tzitzit-tying became a part of Judaica class at Mid-Peninsula Jewish Community Middle School, where Rich is in seventh grade.

It was fitting that they all shared in the process. Before enrolling at the Jewish day school, Rich attended secular schools in Arizona, where his mother lives. Rich says he's now the happiest he's ever been, thanks in good part to his new school, where he learned Hebrew.

"This has been the best year...," Kamrin begins.

"...of my life," his son concludes.

Of course, the highlight was Rich's bar mitzvah itself. Two hundred people attended, many having tied strands of Rich's tallit. Reminders of the tallit were threaded throughout the ceremony, from the tallit-themed invitations to the blue glass Kiddush cup given to Rich by the owner of bob and bob Judaica shop, where Arnie bought the tallit fringes, to the custom blue tallit cake from Max's Opera House Deli.

Rich now uses his tallit for daily prayers at school, and for rounding out the minyan at Beth Am, now that he's a bar mitzvah.

Yet his tallit almost didn't get made. His father originally hollowed out a ram's horn to make a shofar for Rich instead. But that somehow didn't convey the right sentiment.

"It wasn't quite --," Kamrin searches for the words.

"Yeah, it's kind of --," Rich scrunches up his face.

"It..."

"It smelled."

But it all worked out: The shofar now smells fine and is prominently displayed in the Kamrin home.