A Psalm in Cloth: The Pulpit Covers of Temma Gentles

A Psalm in Cloth: The Pulpit Covers of Temma Gentles

By Mikhael Klassen-Kay, HBT Archives Summer Intern

Over the past couple of months, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Holy Blossom’s archives committee as they digitally catalogue all of the files contained in the temple archives, which date from the early 19th century to the present day. On several lunch breaks spent meandering the hallways of the temple, I came across objects discussed in the files I was cataloguing. Many congregants will be familiar with the orange parochet outside the first-floor boardroom, which is believed to have hung in the original Holy Blossom location above Coombes’ Drug Store, when the synagogue was called Sons of Israel. Others might have noticed Sorel Etrog’s “Chasidic Head” statue, originally part of a Holocaust memorial in the courtyard prior to the building renewal, which is now stationed in the grass on the Bathurst side of Holy Blossom. Most of the archival materials on these objects, however, were photographic or textual. So, the discovery of fabric samples and textile blueprints in the archives took me by surprise.

In section HB3 D1b of the Holy Blossom archives, one can find blueprints, letters, and textiles created by the late artist Temma Gentles. The projects of hers that we have archival documentation of include Torah covers, ark textiles, a chuppah, and pulpit covers. Unlike in the chuppah and Torah mantle files in the archives, there are no fabric samples for the pulpit covers. As Gentles explains in a letter to Estelle Latchman, who was chairman of Holy Blossom’s art and acquisitions committee in 1990, the fabric needed for the project was too expensive to justify the creation of a sample textile. Instead, Gentles provided the art and acquisitions committee with a layered art piece as a sample of what the finished product would look like. The drawn sample is for the cover of the Torah pulpit, featuring the first line of Psalm 100:3.

Each of the three finished tapestries depicts four figures rejoicing, with the Hebrew text from a fragment of Psalm 100 overlaid. In a December 1989 letter to Rabbi Dow Marmur, Gentles cites the psalm as the primary inspiration for the pulpit covers. She uses the following translation of verse two and the first line of verse three—“Serve the Lord with gladness! Come into His presence with singing! Acknowledge that the Lord is God.” Though the covers now hang in the northwestern stairwell and not upon any pulpits, they remain beautiful examples of a great Toronto textile artist’s work, and they are well worth seeing if you have the opportunity.