Religious clothing some communities by all married men) on Rosh Hashanah, Hoshanah Rabbah, Tefilas Tal, and Tefilas Geshem. A groom will generally wear a kittel during the wedding ceremony as well. In some Sefardic communities, a Rabbi or a Hazzan may wear a similar white robe at weddings and at prayer services. In Jewish Mysticism, wearing a thin red string (as a type of talisman) is a custom, popularly thought to be associated with Judaism's Kabbalah, in order to ward off misfortune brought about by an "evil eye" ("עין הרע" in Hebrew). In Yiddish the red string is called a "roite bindele".
Kabbalah Centre students (mostly males) only after age 40. Therefore, some traditionalists had seen the Kabbalah Centre as a perversion of Judaism's ancient and secretive mystic tradition. The Kabbalah Centre was founded in the United States in 1965 as The National Research Institute of Kabbalah by Philip Berg (born Feivel Gruberger) and Yehuda Tzvi Brandwein. Brandwein in turn was the dean of Yeshivah Kol Yehuda in Israel (a precursor of the US Kabbalah Centres) which was founded in 1922. After Brandwein's death, and after several years in Israel, Philip Berg and his wife Karen Berg, re-established the U.S. Kabbalah Centre in New