We get somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,500 inquiries a year. The vast majority cover issues that are fairly routine: availability, tallit sizing questions, questions about tallit stripes, letter embroidery, turnaround time, etc. But this morning, in my email box, was a simple inquiry I’ve never received before.
I would like to purchase a man’s tallit that is either fair trade or is made by/supports Jews struggling economically in Israel or elsewhere. Thanks, Laurie
There is a tallit maker out there (MayaWorks) who has their tallitot woven by poor women in Guatemala to help them support their households.
When I saw that I thought some people, primarily liberal Jews, might be interested in tallits woven by poor Arab women living in Eretz Yisrael. But somehow Jews struggling economically escaped my attention.
I told Laurie about our company, and left it up to her to decide if we qualify. We’re based in Modi’in Illit, which is a frum city with a very large number of families — maybe even the majority — struggling to make ends meet. Our family is no longer struggling to pay the bills, thank G-d, but with ten kids, it’s never easy!
The lady who does most of our sewing work (primarily when we switch an atara) and some of the letter embroidery work has a large family and they are definitely not well off.
The kollel man who does our tzitzit tying is not well off, either. He’s fairly young and has only three or four children. He works for us in the afternoon– between study sessions –and sometimes in the evening hours. He’s an excellent, dedicated worker, and I admire him for taking the initiative to pursue part-time work, avoiding the pitfall of descending into debt or poverty, a mistake I think a fair number of kollel men are liable to make.
Our main suppliers are Talitania and Mishkan Hatchelet. I have a hunch that much of the workforce at Mishkan Hatchelet is lower class, since their manufacturing center is in Be’er Sheva, which has a large blue-collar population. I don’t know enough about Talitania to say. The Talitania distributor we work with is a Satmar chassid, and many of his employees are from his own family. I think his business is successful, but I have a feeling that without it, a lot of people would be out of work. Also, someone told me he does a whole lot of chessed with his earnings.
