What’s it like to build a relationship with a sibling significantly older or younger than you — one you never shared a childhood with at all?

"I don’t say this lightly — the day my little sister was born was one of the happiest days of my life,” Chassi shares. Until she was eight years old, she was the youngest in a tight-knit family. Then a little sister joined the crew.

“There are very few events I can point to and say that I had that level of simchah. I wanted a sibling for so long and finally, here she was. For a long while, I didn’t notice everything else that comes along with having a new sibling, like adjusting to the new family dynamic, getting used to having a baby around, accepting that I wasn’t the youngest anymore.”

Ita was already married with a child when her parents welcomed another one of their own, baby Henny. The two siblings weren’t only 21 years apart and at very different stages of life, they also lived in different parts of the world — at a time when international calls were sparse and expensive.

“We saw glimpses of Henny as she was growing up, but I didn’t actually know her,” Ita says. “There was this concept — I knew I had another little sister — but it wasn’t more than that until she was a teenager and able to travel overseas. In day-to-day life, it didn’t play out as something that was part of my life.”

Still, Ita found it beneficial. Her daughter was the same age as her sister, which meant that she and her mother were attending PTA, planning bas mitzvahs, and sending daughters to seminary at the same time — it gave the two a concrete way to be close.

But while Ita has a sister younger than her daughter, Henny is the aunt who was younger than her niece. “It was — and still is — fun to tell people that I was an aunt from the day I was born,” she says.

Because Henny and her siblings were raised so many years apart, she says it often feels like they come from different families. “My older siblings had young parents who pretty much always had a newborn or were expecting a baby. They lived in a boisterous home with lots of activity. I grew up in a big, quiet, empty house, pretty much feeling like an only child,”she says.

Bailey, Chassi’s younger sister, describes another difference: “I hear the stories of the rules my siblings grew up with… I was definitely raised by different parents.” Whenever Bailey complains about rules like curfew, her siblings are quick to remind her that “when we were your age…” the rules were even stricter.

“My parenting definitely changed,” Raizel, Chassi and Bailey’s mother, says with a laugh. “But it’s because I needed to answer to a bunch of ‘shviggers.’ There were lots of opinions on what she should wear and what she should eat and whether or not she should go for a walk.”