When I was growing up there was only one kind of tallit in shul: white with black stripes. As I grew older I began to see thin silver or gold stripes appear between the black stripes of the classic wool design, and the occasional tallit with blue stripes. Today, the prospective tallit buyer has an...

Most of my customers want a white tallit with black stripes, or sometimes blue stripes or other shades, but recently I encountered a bar mitzvah boy who decided he wanted an all-black tallit. His parents vetoed the idea, saying it was "too extreme." And not long ago I had a customer who wanted a custom...

Does your tallit go slip-sliding off the sides of your shoulders every few minutes? When you're trying to focus on tefilah, this can be an annoying distraction. Some people get used to adjusting the tallit on their shoulders without thinking, but others look for a way to prevent "tallit slippage." Some turn to tallit clips, but...

When the formula for the techelet dye was lost, some adopted a custom of adding a blue stripe to the tallit itself. Others opted to add a black stripe of mourning for the loss of techelet. The black stripe gained popularity in Europe of the 15th through 19th centuries, when black-and-white clothing was more...

A few weeks ago a bride by the name of Mandy contacted me with an interesting idea for her chuppah. Either for sentimental reasons or economic reasons or both, she wanted to buy a handmade tallit to be used as her chuppah, and afterwards she would give it to her husband-to-be to use as...

Branko Lustig didn't have much of a bar mitzvah service. When he came of age the Croatian film producer was incarcerated at Auschwitz. This week he was given a bar mitzvah tallit during a ceremony held at Universal Studios, where he produced Schindler's List, during a tribute to the 78-year-old survivor and a lead-up to...