A couple of weeks after my non traditional bat mitzvah I got a gift from my aunt and her family, it was a tzedakah box. The word tzedakah (צדקה) in Hebrew means justice but is more commonly used as charity or good deed and a tzedakah box is a box the holds money that will be donated to charity, often loose change or a percentage of a paycheck. A tzedakah as it is sometimes used as. Like many other Jews my great-great-grandparents and my great-grandparents escaped from Eastern Europe in the early 1900’s. They left everything they knew because they faced discrimination in their home countries, one of the Russian villages some family members came from was burned down in a pogrom. The tzedakah box is a reminder that my family came to the US with almost nothing and now I have the means to donate money. This specific tzedakah box was new when it was given to me but I have lots of memories of my grandmother's tzedakah box which has more of a story than my newer one. Each one is also very different, my grandmother’s is a more traditional metal box with Hebrew on it. Mine is perfect with its imperfections, the house has its bumps and curves and the typewriter style letters aren’t perfectly spaced or all the same size. 

– Cecilia Friedman

Relationship:  Great-grandchild of im/migrant or more Great-grandchild of im/migrant or more