A silversmith in New Mexico shapes kiddush cups from local turquoise
In the high desert of northern New Mexico, where piñon pines give way to distant mountain ridges and small adobe studios dot the back roads, a Jewish silversmith has built a practice that fuses ancient ritual with regional geology. The cups he shapes emerge from silver, intention, and the unmistakable blue-green stone that has defined Southwestern jewellery for centuries. Each piece carries the weight of Shabbat, the colours of the high desert, and the quiet story of an artisan whose family roots and adopted homeland meet at the workbench.
What began as a personal project to mark his own family's Shabbat table has grown into a sought-after line of bespoke vessels. Collectors, rabbis, and Jewish families from Sydney to Albuquerque now commission pieces that feel both grounded in halachic tradition and unmistakably tied to a particular stretch of American Southwest. The result is a craft that resists the fleeting pace of mass production and finds meaning in patient, deliberate making.
| Turquoise Source | Colour Profile | Hardness (Mohs) | Cultural Resonance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cerrillos (NM) | Sky blue to green-blue | 5–6 | Historic mining centre, pre-Columbian trade |
| Sleeping Beauty (AZ) | Clean robin-egg blue | 5–6 | Modern benchmark for uniform colour |
| Kingman (AZ) | Deep blue with matrix | 5–6 | Heavily veined, dramatic contrast |
| Australian Boulder | Green with ironstone matrix | 5–7 | Mined alongside opal, parallels Indigenous stonework |
A workshop in the Sangre de Cristos
The silversmith's studio sits within a modest converted barn outside Santa Fe, where morning light falls across workbenches scattered with raw stone, jeweller's saws, and half-finished vessels. He came to the region decades ago, drawn first by the landscape and later by a Jewish community small in number but rich in character. Today the Jewish Federation of New Mexico serves as a gathering point for congregants spread across towns that often sit hours apart, and the silversmith finds himself at the intersection of those two identities: a craftsman in a place defined by stone, sky, and a Jewish minority community.
He began working silver as a young adult, learning basic metalsmithing from a cousin who had settled in Tucson. A decade later, after moving north and meeting other Jewish families in towns like Taos and Las Cruces, he turned toward ritual objects. The first kiddush cup he ever made was for his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor whose own ritual cup had been lost in the war. That piece, flawed by his own admission but carried back to Australia on a visit to Melbourne relatives, sits now in a velvet pouch in his studio, a reminder of where the work began.
The stone beneath the silver
Turquoise from the Cerrillos hills south of Santa Fe carries a particular resonance for any jeweller working in New Mexico. Mined for centuries by Ancestral Puebloan peoples and later by Spanish colonists, the stone from this region tends toward a softer, variegated blue with hints of green. It is more unpredictable than the commercially standardised material pulled from places like Sleeping Beauty mine in Arizona, and that unpredictability has shaped the silversmith's aesthetic. He works with the matrix rather than against it, letting the dark veins of host rock weave through each cup as a kind of natural inscription.
Some of his Australian clients request stone from his own mine connections, while others have asked about the parallels between Southwestern turquoise and the boulder opal material pulled from places like Coober Pedy or Lightning Ridge. Both materials carry the imprint of place. The silversmith has studied Aboriginal artwork held in the Art Gallery of New South Wales and sees a kinship with the patient, place-bound traditions that animate his own bench. Stone, after all, tells the story of where it came from, and a ritual object ought to remember its origins.
Forging vessels for blessing
The crafting of a kiddush cup is slow and exacting. Silver sheet is annealed, hammered, raised over stakes, and soldered with hard and medium solders, each step demanding its own temperature and timing. Turquoise is shaped separately, fitted into bezels, and set with a careful hand. A single cup can take anywhere from forty to eighty hours, depending on the intricacy of the engraving and the unpredictability of the stone. The silversmith keeps no more than three commissions in his studio at any one time, a discipline that keeps the work from becoming assembly-line production.
He incorporates Hebrew lettering into many of his pieces, often taking requests for family names, the opening words of the kiddush blessing, or verses from Psalm 23 that appear on the inner rim of the cup where only the person drinking sees them. Some cups feature pomegranates, others the Tree of Life, and a few carry small inlays of lapis or sugilite, stones he sources from a supplier in Albuquerque. The cups are kosher by intent and by form, made specifically for the sanctification of wine on Shabbat and festivals.
Where tradition meets place
For Jewish communities scattered across the Southwest, ritual objects that speak to local landscape have particular meaning. A kiddush cup carved from Southwestern stone connects the universal practice of Shabbat with the specific hills and mines where the materials were pulled from the earth. In towns like Albuquerque and Santa Fe, where Jewish families often know one another across congregations, such pieces circulate as wedding gifts, b'nai mitzvah presents, and quiet heirlooms passed between generations.
This regional particularity has resonance beyond New Mexico. Jewish Australians living in Sydney's eastern suburbs, in Caulfield in Melbourne, or in the smaller communities around Perth and Adelaide often maintain ties to multiple homelands at once. A cup crafted from New Mexican turquoise speaks to that layered identity, holding the Jewish tradition alongside an adopted regional landscape. Many of the silversmith's international commissions arrive through word of mouth rather than advertising, a reminder that objects of blessing tend to find the families meant to receive them.
Commissions across two hemispheres
Several recent pieces trace a clear arc across the Pacific. One cup was commissioned for a bar mitzvah held at a synagogue in Sydney's eastern suburbs, where the family requested a small wattle engraving alongside the Hebrew inscription. Another, ordered by a couple in Brisbane preparing for their wedding, featured opal-toned inlays that subtly referenced Australian materials while the body remained distinctly Southwestern. A third, perhaps the most ambitious, was commissioned by a rabbinical student in Melbourne who asked for a teaching piece that could be carried between communities.
These commissions ask the silversmith to think about more than aesthetics. He must consider how the cup will travel, how it will sit on different Shabbat tables, and how it will feel in hands raised in blessing thousands of kilometres from where it was made. Each request becomes a kind of correspondence, a slow letter written in silver and stone between the New Mexico bench and Jewish homes scattered through the southern hemisphere.
Reaching customers beyond the mountains
The silversmith does not maintain a robust online store, preferring direct contact through email and an annual showing at a community craft fair in Santa Fe. His website functions more as a quiet portfolio than a transactional platform, a choice that contrasts with the impatient rhythm of much online commerce. He has noticed that families seeking meaningful ritual objects tend to ask patient questions and accept long lead times, qualities that distinguish his clientele from the wider online market. In a digital landscape crowded with instant win gaming sites and other quick-turnaround platforms, his slow and deliberate process is something of an anomaly.
His international reach depends on these patient conversations. He has been asked to teach a workshop at a Jewish retreat centre outside Melbourne, a trip he is currently planning for the southern hemisphere's spring. Each new destination asks him to adapt his work slightly, considering how the cup will travel, how it will be stored, and how it will be used by hands and families he has never met.
Legacy and the future of the bench
The silversmith is beginning to think about who will inherit the work. He has two adult children, one living in Denver and the other studying public health in Brisbane, and neither has expressed interest in taking over the studio. He is considering an apprenticeship, perhaps with a younger metalsmith from Albuquerque's growing artisan community, someone willing to learn the slower rhythms of the trade. Several of his cups now sit in the homes of families who will, in time, pass them to grandchildren, the original blessing continuing long after the silversmith has lifted his hammer for the last time.
He has also begun documenting his process, photographing finished cups and recording short audio memos about the families who commissioned them. The archive is intended for a future curator, perhaps at the New Mexico History Museum or a Jewish museum somewhere along the eastern seaboard. Cups that hold wine on Friday nights may, in fifty years, hold something else entirely, the prayers of families yet unborn carried forward by vessels shaped from stone pulled from the New Mexican earth. The silversmith thinks often about this long horizon, and it shapes how he works today.
What endures is the quiet meeting of two traditions: a Jewish ritual of blessing, and a Southwestern craft built on silver and turquoise. The cups are not merely decorative. They are functional objects that hold wine, hold memory, and hold the colours of the high desert where they were made.
Anyone who lifts one to lips on a Friday evening should remember that the cup carries both an ancient blessing and the unmistakable blue-green of a particular stretch of New Mexico, shaped by hand, set with intention, and sent out into the world to be used, worn, and eventually inherited.