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From: R. Kovacs
Subject: Open vs closed indicator registry
Date: 26 Elul 5782
My grandfather's community in Baghdad used the evening call to prayer
Nu, my zeyde would have understood this immediately. In Munkács, the church bells served a similar function. Not because they were religiously meaningful, certainly not, but because they were audible. You did not need to see the sky.
Actually, this reminds me. There was a period, maybe 5680 or so, when the church changed its bell schedule. Something to do with a new priest. The evening bells moved from what had been roughly shkiah to nearly an hour earlier. The whole Jewish community had to adjust. Some families continued lighting when the bells rang, out of habit. Others watched the sky again, as their grandparents had before the bells became reliable. My bubbe was indignant. "We have been lighting candles according to the goyishe bells for fifty years," she said, "and now they change the bells without consulting us?"
The new priest, I am told, never understood why Jewish women kept glaring at him in the market.
The question is whether such local knowledge belongs in a specification.
—Shlomo Dov Kovacs
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