Kolpik


In Ashkenazi Jewish tradition, a kolpik is a type of traditional headgear worn in families of some Chassidic rebbes of Galician or Hungarian dynastic descent, by their unmarried children on the Sabbath, and by some rebbes on some special occasions other than Shabbat or major holidays.
The kolpik is made from brown fur, as opposed to a spodik, worn by Polish Chassidic dynasties, which is fashioned out of black fur. A shtreimel, another similar type of fur hat worn by Hasidim, is shorter in height, wider, and disc-shaped, while a kolpik is taller, thinner in bulk, and of cylindrical shape.
It is seen as an intermediate level garment between Shabbat and weekday dress.
The days that some rebbes don a kolpik include:
  • Rosh Chodesh Meal
  • Hanukah
  • Tu BiShvat Meal
  • Isru Chag Meal
  • Meal served to the poor a few days before a child's wedding
  • Yartzeit Meal
It is often thought that Jews adopted wearing fur hats from the Eastern Europeans, possibly from the nobility. In his memoir A World Apart: A Memoir of Jewish Life in Nineteenth Century Galicia, Joseph Margoshes writes regarding Rabbi Shimon Sofer's election to the Imperial Council of Austria: