Festive Flavors

By: Maya Dubinsky, Yael Molchadsky, and Meirav Sarig, Illustrated by: Liora Grossman

Dear Parents,

Which holiday memories remain with you over the years? Is it the sweet aroma of a honey cake, the sharp taste of horseradish, or the festive look of the holiday table? Or perhaps the most important thing of all is the experience of being with family—the stories from grandma and grandpa’s house, family customs passed from generation to generation, or even from one country to another?

Sifriyat Pijama is pleased to offer a book of recipes and stories for the Jewish holidays and festivals. Each holiday has its own foods; every festival has a new story.

The holidays provide a wonderful opportunity to share memories from your own childhood with your children, to strengthen family bonds, and to create new traditions that are unique to your family.

The recipes in the book are easy to prepare and appropriate even for young children. Many children enjoy mixing and kneading, breaking eggs, measuring ingredients, and taking part in the creative process in the kitchen. We recommend that you invite your children to play an active role in holiday meal preparations and encourage them to decipher the recipe instructions for themselves, using the illustrations.

At the end of the book, we invite you to add your own family recipe, or even to write down a story or family custom of your own.

We hope this book will be your companion all year long and in years to come, and we wish you many hours of shared enjoyment preparing the special foods, reading the stories, and spending happy and pleasurable time together as a family!

We invite you to send us photographs of the foods that you made together, or copies of family stories that you shared with one another.