Ladies tip their hats to the holidays

When Nancy Snyder moved from New York to Palm Harbor in 1979 she brought with her a love of hats and memories of her grandmother’s hat shop. Her grandmother Hannah Dobbins opened “The Nu Mode Millinery” in Freeport, Long Island, NY in the mid-40s. “They were gorgeous, high-end hats,” said Snyder. What Snyder found in her new home in Florida, though, was that virtually “no one wore hats here.” Snyder said. A member of Temple B’nai Israel in Clearwater, she noted that over the years rarely has she seen women sporting hats, even on the High Holy Days.

Not so growing up on Long Island.

“In the ‘60s” she said, “every woman walked into the synagogue on the holidays with a hat.”

Snyder’s mother, Gertrude Wolder, worked alongside Dobbin making hats for clients. The two milliners also made hats for themselves — with feathers for winter, flowers for spring and in straw for summer. Holiday hats, though, were special.

Ida Raye Chernin sports a gray felt bowler from Harrod’s of London, left, and an open-weave, navy hat designed by a London milliner who made hats for Princess Diana, right. “We belonged to a Conservative synagogue,” Snyder said, “and my mother and grandmother made themselves new hats each year — one for each

holiday service.”

Snyder said her mother crafted hats out of pelts that clients brought her, while she, the young child, sat in the back and watched her mother stitchthehats. The cutom of ladies always wearing hats, however, was fading, as was the custom of women wearing gloves. Jackie Kennedy, Snyder said, was a boon to the shop, which her mother eventually took over by herself.

“This was an elegant era,” Snyder said, “and wearing hats rooted us in tradition.” Years later, Diana, Princess of Wales, had somewhat the same effect on the millinery industry. Some other Tampa Bay area Jewish women have also continued the tradition they were raised

For others, synagogue customs have changed, modifying the de f ini t ion of what constitutes a head covering for women.

New York native Lorna Michaelson, now of Tampa and a member of Congregation Kol Ami, has a standing hat rack in her bedroom and a closet full of hatboxes. She said she likes to wear hats on Yom Kippur, but looks for something lightweight in the heat.

“I often get a headache with something on my head while I am fasting,” she said.

Michaelson admitted that vanity also acts as a deterrent to hat wearing in Southern climes

Ida Raye and Marshall Chernin on their wedding day in 1962. She still owns the hat among her collection of some 75. “I don’t want to have ‘hat hair’ when I have company on the holidays,” she said. “Hats down here flatten out your hair.”

Sheila Bush, a native of Baltimore who grew up in an Orthodox synagogue, said she comes from a long tradition of hat wearing and loves hats.

“Have I got hats!” she said. “The furrier and fancier the better.”

Bush remembers a popular Baltimore millinery shop, “Harriet’s Hattery,” supplied Jewish women with holiday hats for years. Her own favorite was a leopard fur hat with a big black bow on the front.

“On Yom Kippur it was like the Easter parade of the Jewish community,” she said.

Since arriving in Tampa in 1992, the Kol Ami member said her hats have gone back to their boxes

Margot Benstock and her mother, Ester Fisch, in two of their favorite hats. “It’s too hot here,” she said, “but if a few more people wore hats I would, too.”

Too few people wearing hats is a common cry of hat lovers who have succumbed to small feminine kippot or nothing.

Elaine Viders of Congregation Rodeph Sholom also has given up on hats.

“I don’t wear them because no one else does,” she said.

Instead, she has opted for small, feminine head covers, principally beaded or hand-knitted head coverings.

There are some, though, who grew up in the hatwearing tradition and have stuck with it regardless of the uncovered heads around them. Margot Benstock of Congregation B’nai Israel in St. Petersburg and Ida Ray Chernin of Congregation Rodeph Sholom in Tampa are two of those.

The hat tradition: Margot Bentock’s mother, grandmother and great-grandfather Danish-born Benstock said that in her family women wearing hats goes back as far as she can remember.

“My grandmother always wore a hat,” she said, “and now my mother, sister and nieces have all continued the tradition.”

To her, holidays and Shabbat are linked to hat wearing. “When I put my hat on before I go to shul on Saturday morning I am taken to a place where I am ready to continue taking in Shabbat,” she said.

Benstock, who has a favorite hat shop in her native Denmark, admitted that a little vanity has crept into hat wearing as well.

“My hats make me feel very feminine and special,” she said. “I just love every single one of my hats.”

Ida Raye Chernin, orginally from Savannah, GA, has clung to her family tradition as well. Chernin said she wears a hat every time she goes to services on Shabbat or a holiday.

“I was raised Orthodox and you never went into a synagogue without a hat,” she said.

To Chernin, it’s a matter of respect as well as tradition.

“I wear a hat for religious reasons,” she said, adding that she has no use for the little “doilies,” small lacy circles that women don today.

“They don’t cover the head,” she said.

Chernin buys hats from a favorite milliner in New York City or has them custom made.

“It’s difficult to find hats in the South, except for beach hats,” she said.

So how many hats are we talking about for Chernin?

“Probably 75 or more,” she said. “When I see a hat I love I buy it.”

Chernin admitted she sometimes waits up to two or three years before wearing a new hat, until she finds just the right outfit to match. A hat, coupled with a classic suit, though, is a necessary ingredient for Shabbat and holidays.

“Tradition matters to me,” she said, “and in my tradition that includes hats.”