StorieS of Bat Mitzvah around the world

TodayI Am a Woman

e d i t e d b y

Barbara Vinick and Shulamit Reinharz

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ecollections of the first bat mitzvah at the only synagogue in indonesia, a poignant bat mitzvah memory of World War ii italy, and an American bat mitzvah shared with girls in a Ukrainian orphanage—these are a few of the resonant testimonies about the transition from Jewish girl to Jewish woman collected in Today I Am a Woman. introduced by brief biographical notes and descriptions of Jewish communi-ties around the world, these stories reveal how Judaism defines this important rite of passage in a girl’s life in widely disparate set- tings. the contributions are from bat mitzvah girls of the past and present, their parents, communities, and religious leaders. including evocative family photos—some recent, some from decades past— this rich compilation is an ideal gift for bat mitzvah celebrants, their families, and friends.

RBarbara Vinick is affiliated withthe Hadassah-brandeis institute at brandeis University, where she has studied gendered rituals in Jewish communities worldwide.

Shulamit Reinharz is the Jacob S. Potofsky Professor of Sociology at brandeis University, where she is director of the Hadassah-brandeis institute. Her publica- tions include American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise, Jewish Intermarriage around the World, and The JGirl’s Guide.

J U dA ic A . R e l i g i o n

Jacket illustration: Serena yael tedeschi at her bat mitzvah, casale Monferrato, italy, 2000.

$29.95

Today I Am

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n“A vital book that documents the revolution that has transformed the role that Jewish women play in the public life of the Jewish people in our day. . . . this book bears witness to the breadth and promise that mark contemporary Jewish life. it is a joy to turn its pages.”

—Rabbi David Ellenson, Hebrew Union college-Jewish institute of Religion

“the stories speak for themselves, putting Jewish girls and women on the center of the stage, into the limelight, and at the pulpit. by showcasing ritual innovation, they make a point about Judaism’s elasticity and women’s agency.”

—Hasia R. Diner, coeditor of Remembering the Lower East Side (IUP, 2000)

Bloomington & Indianapolisiupress.indiana.edu1-800-842-6796

“these testimonies constitute the in-credible story of our people: the vast richness of diaspora Jewry; the im-portance of family, community, and rabbis everywhere . . . ; the value of new expectations, as girls, even shy ones, rise to meet them. the book tells about the importance of bat mitzvah in an age of intermarriage, in a world of feminism, tradition, and change. . . . you will surely read this book as i did, through laughter and tears and the sweep of emotions about your own Jewish identity, the joy and pride and vulnerability of being a Jew.”

—Blu Greenberg, author of  On Women and Judaism

“Americans undoubtedly think they know what a bat mitzvah is. Today I Am a Woman will surprise them with its fascinating array of compelling accounts of what it meant for Jewish girls to come of age. the editors scoured the globe to find powerful, varied, and moving depictions of bat mitzvah in the contemporary Jewish world. this is a rich resource for anyone interested in understanding reli-gious diversity, folk practices, and cultural creativity through the lens of gender.”

–Deborah Dash Moore, co-editor of Women and Gender in Jewish History (IUP, 2010)

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C on t e n t s

ix Preface \ Shulamit Reinharz

xiii Acknowledgments

1 Introduction \ Barbara Vinick 10 Africa 27 Asia 53 Australia and New Zealand 63 Caribbean 80 Europe 137 Former Soviet Union, Former Yugoslavia, and East ern

Europe 175 Latin America 217 Middle East and North Africa 248 North America

273 Glossary

279 Further Reading

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Introduction

Barbara Vinick

Personal Memory

W hen I was thirteen, in 1956, the boys in my Hebrew school class at our Conservative temple in Massachusetts were the stars of

bar mitzvah ceremonies. They met with the cantor, who prepared them to read their haftara and give a speech. The bright ones read from the To-rah as well, and led the service. Girls in the class did not do these things. There were no b’not mitzvah. To tell the truth, shy and self- conscious, I felt relieved that I didn’t have to “perform” and be the center of attention. Although I can’t recall discussing it, I’m sure that not everyone shared my relief. Other girls must have felt left out and overlooked, having to wait for confirmation, a graduation ceremony the next year that took the place of b’not mitzvah for girls. At our temple, bat mitzvah celebrations did not start until the late 1960s. The cantor from my childhood years, now deceased, recalled a struggle with the ritual committee, which finally acquiesced when its members were reminded that the other Conservative temple in town had already given girls the opportunity to participate in b’not mitzvah. One of the first bat mitzvah girls was Cindy Frisch. Her mother, Shirley, remembers that the ceremony was strictly circumscribed: only on Friday night; only a prayer service followed by an added- on haftara reading; only

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pastries (no feast); and no separate invitations. So the entire congrega-tion was invited through the temple bulletin, the social hall was decorated with greenery stapled to bulletin boards, and the sanctuary was full for this pioneering effort. Since then, girls in the congregation have been al-lowed to adopt the same ceremony as boys, and in recent years, more and more are wearing tallitot.

Coming- of- Age: R ites of Passage

Societies always have formally marked the passage of young people, both boys and girls, into adult responsibilities. A favorite area of anthropologi-cal study, such rites de passage have been documented everywhere. For Jewish girls, the rite of passage is the bat mitzvah, a pub lic ceremony that gained pub lic acceptance in the twentieth century. My temple’s history parallels the story of bat mitzvah in the United States. The first U.S. bat mitzvah took place in 1922, when Judith Kaplan, the eldest daughter of Lena Kaplan and Mordecai M. Kaplan, the father of the Reconstructionist movement, read a portion from the Chumash and said a blessing from the dais at a Saturday service in the living room of a New York brownstone that served as the first sanctuary of the So-ciety for the Advancement of Judaism. Judith had prepared for less than a week, as her sisters recall in the testimonies I was privileged to obtain for this book. Many people think that Judith’s was the first bat mitzvah in the world. This is not the case.

History of B’not Mitzvah

Selma Kaplan Goldman, one of Judith’s sisters, pointed out an entry in her father’s diary1 written on a trip to Italy in 1922. He briefly describes at-tending a synagogue in Rome, where a young girl and her father ascended the bimah (platform from which the Torah is read) for recognition of her “entering minyan” at age twelve. She recited the Shehechiyanu prayer and received a blessing from the rabbi. (Kaplan notes his own daughter’s cere-mony a few months later in a few lines in the same journal.)2

While the origin of bat mitzvah in the United States is well known, the beginnings of formal recognition of Jewish girls’ coming- of- age else-where are not so clear. The third- century codification of law, the Mishna,

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specifies that a boy automatically reaches maturity at age thirteen and one day, when he becomes responsible for mitzvot. A girl reaches maturity at age twelve and a day, when she must fast on Yom Kippur. Public religious bar mitzvah ceremonies evolved for boys after the fifteenth century, but it took a long time for girls’ coming- of- age to be recognized in any way. Brandeis scholar Jonathan Sarna, in an address at his daughter Leah’s bat mitzvah,3 noted that the first indisputable mention of girls’ pub lic coming- of- age appears in the writings of the nineteenth- century sage Joseph Hay-yim ben Elijah al- Hakam of Baghdad. His Ben Ish Chai advised a simcha (celebration) when girls assumed their womanly obligations at age twelve. In Germany, according to quotes in Erica Brown’s chapter in Jewish Legal Writings by Women,4 b’not mitzvah were advanced in the nineteenth cen-tury to counter the inroads of the Reform movement, which sanctioned neither bar nor bat mitzvah. Early ceremonies, such as the one described by Rabbi Kaplan in Italy and his daughter Judith’s in New York, were hardly comparable to bar mitzvah ceremonies for boys. After all, Torah reading is a mitzvah not in-cumbent upon females. Largely educated by their mothers in the domes-tic realm of Jewish life, girls usually participated in the service only mini-mally.

Jewish Denominations and B’not Mitzvah

But times change. In the United States and elsewhere, as Jews became part of the secular culture, domestic education could no longer be counted on as the sole source of Jewish knowledge for girls. Formal Jewish education came to be seen as necessary for children of both genders. As women ob-tained higher secular educations and began to assume leadership roles in synagogues, and as the women’s movement burgeoned, so did accep-tance that Jewish girls’ coming- of- age should be recognized publicly by the community. But for several decades, there was reticence about b’not mitzvah from more traditional leaders, personified by the learned Rabbi Moshe Fein-stein who, in the 1940s, forbade any bat mitzvah celebrations in the syna-gogue and repudiated even home celebrations. As Norma Baumel Joseph delineates in a 2002 article in Modern Judaism,5 however, even Rabbi Fein-

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stein, known as a great opponent of bat mitzvah observances in the United States, came to accept them within certain limits. Conservative congre-gations took the lead, and in them the bat mitzvah ceremony, beginning after World War II, became “a regular feature of Ameri can Jewish life,” according to an article by Paula Hyman in the YIVO Annual of 1990.6 The Reform movement, which originally allowed but did not embrace such ceremonies, followed, and by the 1970s, most Orthodox congregations were permitting some kinds of bat mitzvah ceremonies in synagogues. Extrapolating from statistics of the National Jewish Population Survey of the United States7 (which, unfortunately, did not collect specific infor-mation about b’nai mitzvah of young family members), I estimate that in the years 1998–2003, more than 80,000 girls participated in bat mitzvah ceremonies nationally. According to the Synagogue Council of Massa-chusetts, virtually every congregation in my state, regardless of denomi-nation, hosts bat mitzvah ceremonies of some kind. The Chabad (obser-vant Chasidic group) in my town, for example, hosts all- women prayer services on Friday night, led by the bat mitzvah girl. The girls meet weekly for eight months with the rabbi’s wife, who has designed a service strictly in accordance with Jewish law. She seeks to instill pride, knowledge, and spirituality among her students. The girls pledge to continue their stud-ies for a year after their bat mitzvah.

Bat Mitzvah around the Wor ld

When I began to think about collecting coming- of- age testimonies from around the world, I suspected that bat mitzvah ceremonies would be con-fined mainly to the United States. As the collection grew, I learned that b’not mitzvah have been fostered by Jewish communities the world over. Just as bat mitzvah ceremonies are regular events on the calendars of Jew ish congregations in the United States, so are they in Latin America, in the Caribbean, in Europe, in Africa, and even in the Far East. Tzivos Ha shem, the children’s or ga ni za tion founded in 1980 by the Lubavitcher rebbe Menachem Schneerson (the late leader of the Orthodox Chasidic movement) and based in Brooklyn, sponsors Bat Mitzvah Clubs Inter-national, which has provided materials to more than 200 clubs for non-

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Orthodox girls in the United States and around the world. The Hadassah- Bran deis Institute (a research institute focusing on Jews and gender that is directed by Shula Reinharz), in collaboration with the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College’s Kolot Rosh Hodesh: It’s a Girl Thing! program, ini-tiated the Bat Mitzvah Project for sixth- grade girls in the United States and Canada. The monthly sessions focus on the relevance of mitzvot in the daily lives of girls of bat mitzvah age. Even in Israel, where secu lar fami-lies have traditionally celebrated with a nonreligious birthday party and Orthodox families were not able to mark the event in the synagogue, bat mitzvah ceremonies are becoming more common, if not universally ac-cepted. The bat mitzvah was welcomed first in Sephardic communities (made up of Jews whose ancestors were expelled from Spain and Portugal more then 500 years ago) and continues to be endorsed in Sephardic circles. But the Ashkenazim (Jews whose ancestors came from France, Germany, and East ern Europe) of Europe and the United States have gone further in granting young women the same ritual status as young men. The World Union for Progressive Judaism (an or ga ni za tion of Reform, Reconstruc-tionist, and Liberal congregations founded in 1926 in London) now has a presence in forty countries. The greatest inroads have been made in Is-rael and in the countries of the former Soviet Union. There are no statis-tics, but girls and boys are equally likely to celebrate b’nai mitzvah in the typically small, egalitarian congregations that belong to the WUPJ, ac-cording to a spokesperson. With a dizzying array of forms—a group or single ceremony, the bat mitzvah girl reading Torah on the bimah or saying a prayer from behind the mehitza, an elaborate choreographed performance using the latest technology or a simple recitation of the Sh’ma—bat mitzvah ceremonies world wide are not easy to categorize. Some are more like the confirma-tion ceremony in which I participated in the 1950s, while others are iden-tical to bar mitzvah ceremonies for boys. Unlike bar mitzvah ceremonies, however, they are not enshrined in tradition. Some observers applaud this as an opportunity to make the ceremony more personal and meaningful. Families have used the bat mitzvah to showcase the talents of their daugh-

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ters and to celebrate cultural elements from their family’s history. Other observers, such as Erica Brown in the article mentioned above, decry the lack of uniformity. She calls upon the Orthodox rabbinic establishment to adopt a standard ceremony. Especially in the United States, some people have condemned the ex-cesses of bat mitzvah parties and the absence of spirituality. In January 2004, an article in the Wall Street Journal about parties for twelve- and thirteen- year- old non- Jews spurred a flurry of letters to the editor from Jews offended by this mimicry of the nonreligious aspects of the event. Yet celebrations that involve a festive community get- together are an in-tegral part of Jewish culture and tradition, and there are precedents in Jewish legal writings that encourage bat mitzvah parties, albeit not on the lavish scale they have reached in some places. The Ben Ish Chai, cited by Erica Brown and Jonathan Sarna, declares that a girl should wear a new dress for the occasion, and Rabbi Yitzchak Nissim, the former Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel from 1955 to 1973, wrote in favor of a se’udat mitzvah, a festive meal to celebrate a bat mitzvah.

About This Collection

In 2000, it would have been very difficult to collect the testimonies found in this volume. Now, thanks to the internet, I was able to communicate-with people everywhere in the world relatively quickly and easily. Be-gin ning with a list of contacts from a previous project of the Hadassah- Brandeis Institute (Esther’s Legacy: Celebrating Purim around the World),8 this collection reflects a web of connections: some writers were found through personal contacts (relatives of friends, friends of relatives, and so on), others by suggestions from colleagues, by searching websites, or via leads from people who could not themselves contribute. Although it is said that there are no more than six degrees of separation between any two people in the world, I had never seen the principle in action more clearly than while working on this project. This is not a systematic collection: it is neither a scientific survey nor a complete inventory of bat mitzvah practices. That remains for the future. This compilation is about variety. One of the goals was to include as many countries as possible, to show that Jews live now or have lived in the past

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in virtually every corner of the world. Authors include young women who recently celebrated b’not mitzvah, parents of bat mitzvah girls, women who recall their own b’not mitzvah years ago, women who participated in adult b’not mitzvah, and community leaders. Authors also include women who did not participate in formal bat mitz-vah ceremonies. Some, in clud ing the descendants of Anousim—literally, “forced ones,” Crypto- Jews who were forced to convert, yet maintained remnants of Jewish practice—have written about recognizing their Ju-daism and other personal coming- of- age experiences. Others come from communities where bat mitzvah was unheard- of. Authors from the In-dian subcontinent, where concepts of purity and cleanliness are promi-nent in women’s traditional roles, have written about their family’s recog-nition of the arrival of puberty, an event usually overlooked in West ern society. (In Jewish and Female, published in 1984,9 Susan Weidman Schneider notes an unusual private celebration in which a mother gives a specially designed moontree necklace to her daughter.) Others have written about adult b’not mitzvah. In the United States, Hadassah has sponsored the Eishet Mitzvah program with the Frankel Center for Jewish Family Edu-cation in Jerusalem to prepare women for bat mitzvah as part of a joint curriculum of study. One of the major themes shared by b’not mitzvah around the world is the involvement of the whole family. Many Jewish communities, deci-mated by world events and struggling to rise from the ashes, are using b’not mitzvah as a way to educate the family as well as the bat mitzvah girl herself. Psychologist Judy Davis, in a 1994 issue of Lilith magazine de-voted to contemporary bat mitzvah practices, describes b’not mitzvah as a milestone for mothers and fathers.10 It may be the first time they present themselves publicly as religious adults. Parents who help the bat mitzvah girl prepare for the ceremony oft en further their own Jewish learning and strengthen their ties to the Jewish community. As parents shop for and plan the celebration, their bonds with their daughters can be strength-ened and everyone’s self- images can be enhanced by the successful com-pletion of tasks. It is difficult to generalize about personal responses to bat mitzvah and coming- of- age practices. Working on Esther’s Legacy taught me that

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everyone has a story to tell. Potential authors were given few guidelines; they were told only to write about coming- of- age in a personal way and they were encouraged to share something about their communities. Some of the stories may be troubling to readers looking for inspiration, but we felt it was important to represent a range of experiences. As these testimo-nies show, some young women feel pride in traditional roles, while others have felt discrimination keenly because of their gender. You will discover anger, frustration, indifference, and embarrassment in these brief pieces, as well as satisfaction, delight, self- esteem, and sweet nostalgia. A collec-tion of testimonies from only the satisfied and spiritually advanced might have been uniformly uplifting, but it would not have represented the full range of Jewish experiences. Feel free to open this volume to a page at random to see what you find. Like me, you will probably be surprised to find Jewish communities in places you never thought of.11 You may identify with the feelings and ex-periences of people very far from where you live, a connection that Jew-ish life engenders. You may grieve the loss of communities that no longer exist. But finally, I hope you will feel that this is a heartening collection. We can be proud of our variety, of our tenacity to endure in the face of challenges and forced journeys from country to country, of our ability to adopt elements from the cultures in which we live while retaining our es-sential identity, of our facility to change with the changing conditions of our lives while maintaining our core values. Our names and rituals may be different depending on our countries of origin, but the principles that join us together are more powerful than the variations that keep us apart.

Notes

1. Mel Scult, ed., Communings of the Spirit: The Journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan, vol. 1: 1913–1934 (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 163. 2. Ibid., 159. 3. Personal communication to Shula Reinharz, 2006. 4. M. D. Halpern and C. Safrai, eds., Jewish Legal Writings by Women (Jerusalem: Urim, 1998), 233–258. 5. Norma Baumel Joseph, “Ritual, Law, and Praxis: An Ameri can Response to Bat Mitsva Celebrations,” Modern Judaism 22 (2002): 234–260.

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Introduction | 9

6. Paula Hyman, “The Introduction of Bat Mitzvah in Conservative Judaism in Postwar America,” YIVO Annual 19 (1990): 134.  7. C. Kadushin, L. Saxe, and B. Phillips, eds., “National Jewish Population Sur-vey 2000–2001: A Guide for the Perplexed,” Contemporary Jewry 25 (2005): 1–35.  8. Vinick, ed., Esther’s Legacy.  9. Susan Weidman Schneider, Jewish and Female (New York: Simon and Shus-ter, 1984), 131–133. 10. Judy Davis, “Bat Mitzvah/Bar Mitzvah: Every Family’s Rite of Passage,” Lilith (Fall 1994): 30–32. 11. Jews in Places You Never Thought Of is the title of a book edited by Karen Pri-mack, in association with Kulanu. Kulanu, an or ga ni za tion that helps remnants of the Jewish people worldwide, helped me to find many of the authors in this volume.

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