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In Jewish tradition, after someone dies, the anniversary of their death is marked by lighting a yahrzeit candle. It comes in a stubby glass holder a couple inches high, and it burns for 24 hours to remember and honor the person you have lost. And after the candle has burned, you're left with that little glass. As Deena Prichep reports, in some families, that old glass has found a new use.
DEENA PRICHEP, BYLINE: Ruth Lebed's grandmother came from Eastern Europe, a part that was sometimes Russia, sometimes Poland. She never learned English very well, but she was an amazing baker.
RUTH LEBED: She would make ruggelach and she would make strudel and all of these little delicacies that you really didn't see in bakeries.
PRICHEP: After her grandmother died, Ruth and her mom tried to recreate her recipes, specifically her hamantaschen - little jam-filled cookies for the Purim holiday, which called for a glass of juice.
LEBED: And we're all like, what's a glass?
PRICHEP: So they tried a cup - didn't work. One of their everyday juice glasses - also wrong.
LEBED: And then, finally, my mom said, you know what? Grandma used to keep all of her yahrzeit glasses.
PRICHEP: And that was it. Yahrzeit glasses were mentioned as far back as the Middle Ages, but the mass-produced glass holders came later. Ads for yahrzeit candles from Standard Oil Company start showing up as early as 1914. The glasses of a hundred years ago were a bit bigger than today's - like a small juice glass, thick and beveled, sturdy enough to hold a candle that burns a whole day. The kind of sturdiness that new immigrants, like Ruth Lebed's grandparents, would want to hold onto.
LEBED: They didn't have a lot of money, so whatever they could reuse, they reused.
PRICHEP: Which is fine because the yahrzeit glass is not officially a sacred object. There's nothing in the Torah. It's a custom.
SARIT WISHNEVSKI: The candle is a mechanism. It's a way for us to bring ourselves into a moment.
PRICHEP: Sarit Wishnevski leads Kavod v'Nichum, a Jewish group that supports people preparing bodies for burial and caring for mourners. She says because there's no official liturgy, people can light the yahrzeit candle and figure out what it has to say to their own personal mourning.
WISHNEVSKI: We don't get over people, right? We carry them with us forever. And it's a really beautiful way to remember those people and to dedicate time to the people who are with us.
PRICHEP: But not everyone has that reaction to the yahrzeit candle.
HASIA DINER: It really freaked me out.
PRICHEP: Hasia Diner taught Jewish history at New York University. When she was growing up, her father and stepmother lit a lot of yahrzeit candles.
DINER: There'd be the glass for all of her relatives killed in the Holocaust - you know, her parents, her husband. To me, it was just traumatic to see these things.
PRICHEP: Diner says she didn't want to see the glasses with flames in them. And she didn't want to see them on the table filled with orange juice or used to cut out dough for poppy seed cookies. But it made her realize that death is a part of life. And looking back now, Diner sees it as kind of beautiful.
DINER: Just to think that that cookie that I am biting into came from the glass to remember my mother, that's kind of really powerful.
PRICHEP: To some extent, the generations who came before are always in the room when you make an old family recipe. But using a yahrzeit glass - this physical reminder of loss - makes that presence even more concrete in a way that's sort of bittersweet and beautiful and maybe even delicious. For NPR News, I'm Deena Prichep.
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