Who Are the Ushpizot? (Sukkot 2026 / 5787)

Seven names on the wall of the sukkah. The Ushpizin custom is about seven hundred years old, and the seven names it carries settled roughly three centuries after that.¹ The Ushpizot custom is a few decades old, and more than one list of seven women is in circulation for it. The seven on our Welcome Ushpizot sukkah hanging are the seven the Talmud counts as prophets: Sarah, Miriam, Devorah, Hannah, Avigayil, Huldah and Esther.²

Where the seven guests come from

The Zohar describes seven righteous guests who come into the sukkah, but it does not list them. It names Avraham and David, and counts five more in between.¹ The seven in the order most people use now were fixed centuries later.

Aramaic ushpiza is a night's lodging, and ushpizin are the guests in it.⁶ Where the word itself came from is unsettled: it is usually traced to Latin hospitium, which is also behind English hospice and hotel, while Jastrow argues for a Semitic root.⁶

The Zohar doesn't stop at naming guests. The portion set aside for them, it says, goes to the poor.¹ If it doesn't, Avraham gets up from the table and leaves.

Ushpizot puts the same word in a Hebrew feminine plural. You will also see Ushpizata, which is the Aramaic one, on sets for sale right now.

So why do different sources name different women?

Because more than one list is in circulation, and they overlap enough to be confusing.

Both were assembled. The Ushpizin list took about three hundred years to fill in from a passage that names two of its seven. The Ushpizot are doing the same thing, several centuries behind.

The version you'll meet most often is built on the matriarchs: Sarah, Rivka, Rachel and Leah, with three more behind them, usually Ruth, Devorah and Miriam.⁴ It's the Ushpizin list in the feminine, and it's the roster several of the sets on the market use.

The second is the seven women the Talmud counts as prophets, in Megillah 14a.² That is the list JOFA and the Women's League for Conservative Judaism both publish, and the one behind a poster first published in 2005.⁵

Others don't stop at seven. Ritualwell's Ushpizot ritual opens on Rivka, Rachel and Leah, then keeps going into Dona Gracia Nasi and Hannah Szenesh. Another set names twenty-six Jewish and Israeli women.⁴

Sarah, Miriam and Devorah sit on both of the seven-name lists, so the first three names of one can be the first three names of the other. Huldah, Avigayil and Hannah turn up on no matriarch roster, which is the quickest way to tell which list you have.

The seven on ours

Megillah 14a puts the number of prophetesses at seven³ and names them: Sarah, Miriam, Devorah, Hannah, Avigayil, Huldah and Esther.²

We chose it because it has a basis in the Gemara. Seven women, named together in one passage. Which seven prophetesses Megillah 14a names is not really in dispute. A kabbalist in Italy had set those same seven alongside the seven guests by about 1600, long before anyone hung them in a sukkah.⁷

The matriarchs are four. A roster built on them picks three more. Which three was the question we could never answer for ourselves. The organizations already publishing Ushpizot material had landed on the Talmud's seven, and that counted with us.

Welcome Ushpizot is our set of seven panels, one for each of those names. We went looking at what else was being made for the sukkah, and everything we found was flat: a print, or a painted panel. So ours are in relief. The pattern stands off the face of the panel, and the name sits raised above it, Hebrew over English.

Setting it out, and packing it away

A sukkah decoration spends most of its life in a box. That is the part we designed for.

The seven panels hang side by side in a single run on one cord. The cord arrives strung, with the spacing already fixed by crimp stops. We set it once so nobody has to set it again. The set stores on its cord with the panels stacked, and it goes back up next year at the same spacing.

No two of the patterns repeat. Each one was drawn to match the woman whose name it carries, which is what made seven different patterns necessary. The relief is deep enough to trace with a finger.

The panels are plum, with rose-gold lettering and a rose-gold frame. The companion set, Welcome Ushpizin, carries the seven guests of the older custom in navy and silver.

Shop Welcome Ushpizot →
See the Welcome Ushpizin set →
Everything for Sukkot →

From our home to yours, chag sameach.

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Sources

1. The guests in the sukkah, the portion that goes to the poor, and Avraham's departure: "when a man sits in this abode of the shadow of faith, the Shekinah spreads her wings over him from above and Abraham and five other righteous ones make their abode with him"; "Abraham and five righteous ones and David with them"; "He must also gladden the poor, because the portion of those guests whom he invites must go to the poor"; and Avraham rising, "Depart, I pray you, from the tents of these wicked men." The passage does not enumerate seven names. The fixed list and its order come from later practice, in the Arizal and the Shlah (16th–17th centuries). Zohar, Emor 43:270-282
2. "Who were the seven prophetesses? Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, Huldah, and Esther." Megillah 14a:13 (Sefaria's translation reads Deborah and Abigail where the panels read Devorah and Avigayil.)
3. "…the forty-eight prophets and the seven prophetesses who prophesied on behalf of the Jewish people." Megillah 14a:3
4. Matriarch-based rosters vary between publishers. One widely sold canvas set names Sarah, Rebekkah, Rachel, Leah, Ruth, Deborah and Miriam, in the listing's own spellings. A contemporary series runs to 26 notable Jewish and Israeli women.
5. Ma'yan's poster Welcoming Women to the Sukkah (Ellen Alt) was first published in 2005, on this same roster. JOFA and the Women's League for Conservative Judaism are linked in the text above.
6. Jastrow, s.v. אוּשְׁפֵּיז: "night's lodging, inn", plural אוּשְׁפִּיזִין, and בעלי א׳ "innkeepers". Jastrow's own etymology does not go to Latin — he derives the word from נשף, comparing Mandaic שפינזא, citing Nöldeke. The Latin hospitium derivation is the one usually repeated, and it is not his.
7. The attribution is to Menachem Azariah da Fano, the Rema mi-Fano (1548–1620), in Asarah Ma'amarot, and is reported by JOFA. We have not seen the primary text.