Home

For New Jerseyans who enjoy dining in pristine outdoor settings for the entire weeklong festival of Sukkot, Mother Nature had other plans this year.

On Oct. 7, the fifth day of the holiday, wind gusts of up to 55 miles per hour across the state toppled trees, telephone poles, and scores of sukkahs. At Congregation Ahavas Achim in Highland Park, the synagogue sukkah came down that morning and could not be put back up since its beams were bent, Rabbi Steven Miodownik said.

But there's no reason to despair about how the lives of this year's sukkahs were cut short, Miodownik said, because sukkahs are designed to be fragile as the point of the holiday is to leave our permanent homes for temporary dwellings.

"It's not a firm structure, it's supposed to be porous," Miodownik said of a sukkah. "It's not supposed to protect us from the weather. [The fact that sukkahs fell down] is an acknowledgement that we are only protected by God."

While Ahavas Achim used a snap-together "EZ Sukkah," sold by Sukkah Outlet, Miodownik said that at home he built the older sukkah model that involves attaching poles with an Allen wrench. Both sukkahs have metal poles that hold up the walls -- and both were no match for the wind, Miodownik said.

"My sukkah was dead on arrival," he said.

The framework of the sukkah at Congregation Etz Ahaim in Highland Park managed to survive the wind, as poles that hold up one of the sukkah's walls are attached to a fence in the shul's backyard, and another wall is bolted to the back of the shul building.

In fact, Etz Ahaim's framework stays up all year and the sechach is simply added to top off the sukkah for the holiday, Rabbi David Bassous explained. But this year, even though the synagogue tied down the sechach with unfinished string, the winds managed to scatter the sukkah's ceiling in all directions.

Bassous said his sukkah at home, by contrast, is built from solid plywood walls that were bolted together, while the sechach is supported by a set of sturdy wooden two-by-ones. As Bassous' sukkah didn't even budge in the wind, perhaps Etz Ahaim should also use heavier sechach materials next year, he said.

"It's the most solid sukkah I've ever seen," Bassous said of his sukkah at home. "Nothing happened."

On the seventh day of Sukkot, sukkahs at Highland Park's Mei Garden and Jerusalem Pizza restaurants were still up and running -- poles, walls, and sechach. While Jerusalem Pizza used thick rope to tie its sukkah to a railway and supported the back of the structure with two-by-four wooden posts, Mei Garden tied its sukkah's corners and crossbars with heavy twine to posts in the ground as well as a fence that was next to the sukkah.

"Thank God we decided to tie it down when we first put it up," said Adam Brelow, a manager and mashgiach at Mei Garden.

Brelow said that the winds began to pick up as he was eating lunch in the Mei Garden sukkah on Oct. 7. He witnessed the sukkah briefly lift up in the air, but the twine managed to jerk it back down.

"I thought the whole thing was going to fly away," Brelow said.

A spokesperson for Passaic-based Sukkah Outlet said the company doesn't offer warranties that cover weather-damaged sukkahs, but that customers whose sukkahs were totaled this year can purchase replacement parts at discounted rates.

As there is no rhyme or reason to why specific sukkahs fall and others don't, the spokesperson explained, there are no proposed changes to the EZ Sukkah model for next year.