Friendship is the common denominator for three Jewish handicraft groups in Tucson.
The Pomegranate Guild of Judaic Needlework, the longest-running of the three, is part of a national organization dedicated to passing Jewish needlework traditions to future generations. Members use various techniques, from embroidery to beading to needlepoint, to create Judaic items for ritual and cultural use. Barbara Esmond founded the Tucson chapter in 2012 and organizes the monthly meetings.
The Northwest Needlers recently changed their name to The Knitzvah Project to reflect their main purpose: knitting or crocheting items for charity. The group began nine years ago under the auspices of the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona and is now part of the Northwest Tucson Jewish Community. During the pandemic, members met on Zoom; now their meetings rotate between Zoom and members’ homes, with lunch meetings every six weeks at different local restaurants where they can stay and knit after the meal.
Chabad of Oro Valley Handicrafters, which started in October 2023, welcomes people who engage in any kind of handicraft. Most members knit or crochet, but participants have also done quilting, jewelry making, macrame, and needlepoint. Some work on items for charity; others create for themselves or their families. The main aim is to foster friendships among like-minded people, says the group’s founder and coordinator, Sharon Lichtbach Plotnick.
The projects are not necessarily Judaica, but Plotnick opens each meeting with an inspirational Jewish quote from Chabad.org or from a book on loan from Mushkie Zimmerman, one of Chabad of Oro Valley’s leaders.
In Tucson’s small Jewish community, crossover among the groups is common. Plotnick also attends meetings of The Knitzvah Project. Judith Feldman, the Knitzvah Project’s coordinator, is a regular at Handicrafters gatherings. Lois Bodin, a Pomegranate member, also travels from her eastside home to Knitzvah Project meetings; the NWTJC welcomes participants from all over Southern Arizona.
Members of all three groups enjoy chatting while they work, with topics ranging from food and families to health, travel, and politics. And yes, there is talk of patterns, stitches, and techniques, whether it is longtime knitters learning to crochet or vice versa at Knitzvah meetings, or how to do the embroidery stitches with exotic names like huck, Brazilian, and hardanger that made Esmond fall in love with the Pomegranate Guild.
Artist Anne Lowe, a longtime member, calls on her design skills to help Esmond create new projects for the Pomegranate group.
Bodin, a Pomegranate member in Tucson for 11 years and in Las Vegas for 10 years before that, says that although she’s not “a master stitcher” like Esmond, she’s made interesting and beautiful projects that she has framed and hanging in her home.
At Pomegranate meetings, members often share what’s happening at their synagogues, since they belong to different congregations, she says.
Craft groups, she says, “are a wonderful way when you come into the community to meet people from all over.”
Tucson-born Sheri Karobonik, a fabric artist and certified master knitter, also comes to Pomegranate meetings for the company.
At the September Pomegranate meeting, she worked on a scarf to be donated to the Navajo Nation, where winter temperatures often dip below 20 degrees. She explains that teenage Navajo boys, who are often more than 6 feet tall, wrap the scarves over their hats and then around their necks, covering their faces, so the scarves need to be more than 6 feet long.
Karobonik, who is ambidextrous and recently began knitting left-handed to keep from being bored, also makes up to 13 dozen hats annually for kids of all ages in the Flowing Wells school district.
The Knitzvah Project began with four members and now has “a solid group of eight,” Feldman says. They began knitting hats for a single kindergarten class at Homer Davis Elementary School and now make hats for all three kindergarten classes, plus extras for kids in other grades. Homer Davis, where more than 85% of students live below the U.S. poverty level, is the focus of an ongoing, multifaceted Jewish Philanthropies of Southern Arizona project.
The Knitzvahs’ tzedakah doesn’t stop there. They also make hats, scarves, neck warmers, and fingerless mittens for unhoused women at Sister Jose Women’s Center; shawls for DaVita Tucson Central Dialysis patients; and tiny sweaters and hats for premature babies at Tucson Medical Center’s neonatal unit.
Other projects over the years have included lap blankets and slippers for care homes, twiddle muffs for people with dementia, and knitted dolls that became part of a humanitarian mission to Africa.
The group accepts gifts of yarn – Feldman recalls one donation that filled the trunk and back seat of her car plus more she held on her lap – but members also buy and share yarn.
“We don’t make mistakes, we make design elements” is one of the Knitzvahs’ cardinal rules, says Feldman, who has been knitting since she was eight years old. The other is, “If it’s not fun, you don’t have to do it.”
At a Knitzvah’s meeting in a restaurant this summer, the attendees touched base with a member who was out of town via a brief video call.
“It’s very casual, it’s very low pressure. Mostly it’s social, but I think we do good work. And anybody and everybody is welcome,” Feldman says.
For more information about the Knitzvah Project, email judithgfeldman@gmail.com; for the Pomegranate Guild, email Esmond at brealjs@gmail.com, and for the Handicrafters, email Plotnick at sharon_gross@yahoo.com.
