For much of her childhood, Sigi Mantel’s mother struggled with depression. Sometimes it was so debilitating that she was confined to her bed, so she would send Sigi to her grandmother Aliza’s house. That’s where the happiness of her childhood was — not at home, Sigi says. 

Aliza always greeted her with a big smile and the two would go straight to the kitchen, joined by Sigi’s aunt Yafa who lived there as well. Together, they cooked dishes from Aliza’s native Syria like stuffed squash and medias, a dish of beef patties with eggplant slices, as they laughed and sang in Arabic. Despite moving to British Mandate Palestine in 1932, when she was 18, Yafa never mastered Hebrew, but it didn’t seem to matter, Sigi recalls. There was the language of the kitchen, one of love, that everyone understood.

Leading up to Passover, the trio would make a special kibbeh with ground rice instead of the traditional bulgur and a layered pie with ground meat, nuts, and matzo that the family calls matzo kebab. Sigi would help set up a table on the balcony for the lunch Aliza hosted the day after Seder. And when her family arrived, they always greeted Aliza by saying “Yislamu Yidichi,” which roughly translates to “May your hands be blessed” or “Bless your hands.” Her family stayed for hours, Sigi recalls longingly.

It wasn’t until she was a mother herself, that Sigi realized the treasure trove of Syrian recipes and flavors she learned in Aliza’s small kitchen. Through them, she’s always been able to find joy even in dark hours. 

Five years ago, Sigi hit a rough patch in her life both at home and with her parents. Her father’s health was starting to fail and her mother was battling Alzheimer's. She felt she needed to do something for herself and settled on creating a book of memories for her mother with family recipes and photos, and stories of their relatives in Syria who were Zionist spies before the founding of modern Israel.

It was a therapeutic project for her, Sigi explains. She wrote down the recipes she knew from those days in the kitchen and asked her mother to tell her the ones she could still recall. Sigi went to flea markets to find tablecloths and plates so the food photos would look “just right,” she says — as if her grandmother had set the table. 

When it came to the family photos, though, she had to cross a chasm that had developed in the family and call her aunt Yafa. Sigi had been estranged from her since she was 20, when she learned Yafa and her father had carried on an affair for years. An open secret among the adults of the family, Sigi came to see her mother’s depression in a different light. Still, she reached out to her aunt for the book. 

When they finally met at her grandmother’s old apartment, Yafa told Sigi that her father was the love of her life and that she thought of her as her daughter; she asked for her forgiveness. Their conversation rekindled their once close relationship, and Sigi says it taught her to be guided by her heart, not by others’ opinions. 

When she finally shared the finished book called “Bless Your Hands: Dishes from the Syrian-Damascus Kitchen” with family members, they were moved to tears. Her nephews insisted that the 15 copies she printed simply weren’t enough and that it would resonate with others outside of the family.

So Sigi enrolled in a digital marketing course and started connecting with Syrian communities online and in person. The first time she posted about the book in one of them, she was scared, but positive responses came flooding in from Syrians in Israel and abroad. From that moment, she says, the book took on a life of its own and Sigi simply followed it. 

She forged relationships with others passionate about Syrian cooking and a year ago, quit her job to focus on food full time, offering workshops and lectures on Jewish Syrian cooking, and even a form of culinary therapy where she works with individuals or families to cook through a difficult time. 

In her own life, food is how she continues to comfort her mother whose memory has faded. For Passover, Sigi will make the same dishes Aliza always did to help her mother remember. 

She also finds solace for herself in the kitchen. When she cooks her grandmother and aunt Yafa’s recipes and gets the taste “just right,” that’s when she feels a connection. Just as she is protecting their memory, she adds, they are protecting her.