Adas Israel
Adam Crausman

B’nai Israel Congregation
Alex Michael Sklar
Judith Brittney Altneu
Dahlia Marie Frier

B’nai Shalom of Olney
Joshua Kram

Beth Sholom Congregation
and Talmud Torah
Joshua Liebstein

Congregation B’nai Tzedek
Nicole Weisman
Zachary L. Rosen

Congregation Beth El of Montgomery County
Lila Hoffman-Byer
Madeline Molyneux

Congregation Beth Emeth
Jared Tankel

Congregation Har Shalom
Danielle Klein

Kol Shalom
Shana Laine
Shaare Tefila
Anna Sapcariu

Shaare Torah
Mitchell Wasserman

Temple Beth Ami
Jeremy Golub
Jacob Glazier
Joshua Levine

Temple Emanuel
Sara Reff
Rebecca Davids

Temple Micah
Noah Freedman
Temple Rodef Shalom
Lily Hannah Karp

Temple Shalom
Anton Putterman

Temple Sinai
Micah Hurewitz
Aaron Shoham

Tifereth Israel
Eli Mayer

Henry Modlin, a local retired podiatrist who practiced in Washington, D.C., became a bar mitzvah in 1944 at Congregation B’nai Israel, then located at 14th and Emerson Streets in Washington. On Nov. 8, at Congregation Har Shalom in Potomac, in the company of family and friends, he will celebrate by reading from the Torah at Shabbat services not only reaching his 83rd birthday, but also the 70th anniversary of his bar mitzvah. No one will be listening more closely than his grown grandsons, Ben Samit and Steven Lewis, since both of them read the same portion at their b’nai mitzvah.

Mazel tov to Veda Robin of Kehilat Shalom in Gaithersburg as she was called to the Torah on Oct. 25 as a bat mitzvah.

Jeremy Ashe, son of Jordana and Gregory Ashe of Potomac, became a bar mitzvah Nov. 1 at Beth Sholom Congregation and Talmud Torah in Potomac. Joining in the simcha were sisters Hannah and Sarah Ashe, as well as grandparents Carol and Stanley Newman of Washington, D.C., and Marilyn and Michel Ashe of Virginia Beach, Va. Jeremy is a seventh-grader at the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville.

Suzi and Marc Mouallem announce the bar mitzvah of their son, Gabriel Kaz Mouallem, on Rosh Chodesh Nov. 23 at Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C. Gabriel is a seventh grader at The British School of Washington in D.C. Joining in the simcha will be Gabriel’s grandmother, Sara Katz of Bethesda.

As part of the tour, families gather at the giant menorah by the Knesset in Jerusalem, where b’nai mitzvah certificates are handed out.
Photo courtesy of Israel Discovery Tours

There are bar mitzvahs celebrated at a local synagogue. There are bar mitzvahs held in large social halls, or country clubs. And then there are bar mitzvahs, on a whole other scale, where the family travels to Israel to celebrate the simcha together.

Israel Discovery Tours specializes in these b’nai mitzvah, where the teen and a few members of the immediate family spend about two weeks in Israel, gaining a love for the country and a bar mitzvah at sunrise atop Masada.

The concept behind the family bar and bat mitzvah tours run by Israel Discovery Tours is to “give the child that connection with Israel,” said Bradley Sharps, vice president of the company located in Skokie, Ill. “It really does happen,” he said.

Years after a person’s bar or bat mitzvah ends, memories fade to the effort involved and how fun the party was. But a family trip to Israel can create memories of the Jewish state and also lead a person to want to return, he said.

“It’s like a gift you can give your family and yourself of a lifetime memory,” Sharps said.

Some of the company’s clients are children whose parents also went on this tour with their parents. Generally five to eight families are involved in each of the company’s three tours, two of which are held in the summer and one during the winter break. The participants travel by bus together.

The cost is $4,295 per person for the 12-day tour and $4,974 for the 14-day adventure, not including air fare. The bar mitzvah child goes for free.

During the trip, the family generally spends time in Jerusalem, and goes on an archeological dig. The travelers visit Yad Vashem and the Israel Museum. They share tea with Bedouins and spend time at the Dead Sea, Caesaria and Eilat.

The participants, who share the day’s parsha, hold their b’nai mitzvah atop Masada, followed by a kiddush. They don’t miss out on the party, traveling to Tel Aviv for a shared bar mitzvah bash, Sharps said.

His company has “a large following” in this area, particularly in Potomac and Gaithersburg, he said.

Israel Discovery Tours has been in business for 25 years and offers other tours as well.

spollak@washingtonjewishweek.com

Leslie Kanner
Photo by Geoffrey W. Melada

To find out what’s hot – and what’s not – in bar/bat mitzvah gift giving this season, I checked in with Leslie Kanner, owner of Israeli Accents, the longtime Judaica store off of Rockville Pike.

Two sartorial staples of the b’nai mitzvah are the tallit, the prayer shawl with knotted fringes, and the kippah, the head covering. Both remain popular gifts, says Kanner, although they have evolved contemporary looks.

Today’s tallit is not only made from Israeli wool, but also handwoven silk or handwoven cotton. And these mantles come in more background colors than white. She now sells them with blue, red and teal backgrounds, with lots of additional color options for the stripes. Especially for women, there are sheer tallitot, embroidered with silk flowers and striped in hues of turquoise, pink or purple. “A tallis is not just what people grew up with 30 or 40 years ago,” she says.

All those extras will cost you, though. While a traditional one in white, with blue or black stripes, costs around $55, the handmade ones cost up to $500. If you opt for one of those, be careful where you dry clean it, Kanner says. “I tell people to check with their synagogues. Someone in the office will know who to send them to. There’s the old story about the dry cleaner who said, ‘It took forever to get those knots out.’ You don’t want that problem.”

Kippot are much less boring these days, too. Lately, Kanner has seen bar mitzvah boys buying them with customized designs to reflect their boyhood passions—Harry Potter, baseball, even hot peppers. G Street Fabrics, the historic Washington fabrics store owned by the Greenzaid family, sells kippah fabric in bulk. Kanner says many of her customers buy the fabric first, and then bring it to her for customization.

Another b’nai gift-giving trend Kanner sees are yadim, the pointers used to follow along the text of the Torah. These, too, have come a long way. Whereas they used to come in sterling silver only, pewter and even anodized aluminum yadim are now popular – “and they feel really good in the hand.” Geared toward women are bejeweled yadim in pink and purple. “People don’t return them,” Kanner says. “That’s a good sign.”

One gift-gifting tradition that’s fallen off is the “serious pen,” says Steve Rabinowitz, a Washington communications consultant whose son, Jake, celebrated his bar mitzvah only a month ago at Adas Israel Congregation. “When I was a kid, my parents were still joking about their generation, ‘Today I am a fountain pen.’” He received one for his bar mitzvah in 1970. His son, in 2015: zero. “People do still give them, but not very often,” confirms Kanner.

Like his son, Rabinowitz recalls getting “a lot of checks.” But he also got something less fungible – “three (three!) electric pencil sharpeners. Apparently, it was the latest thing.”

gmelada@midatlanticmedia.com
@geoffreymelada

Mount Tabor
Eli Zahavi via Wikimedia

When I chanted the haftarah during my bar mitzvah ceremony in 1992 at Temple Rodef Shalom in Falls Church, the words carried extra meaning. That’s because a year earlier my father and I boarded a TWA airplane (remember those?) bound for Tel Aviv, and I made my first trip to Israel where the biblical stories we read about in synagogue took place.

My haftarah portion was about a battle that occurred more than 3,000 years ago at Mount Tabor, rising to a height of 1,886 feet in northern Israel’s lower Galilee region overlooking the Jezreel Valley. The Israelite army led by military commander Barak and prophetess Deborah defeated the Canaanite forces led by Sisera. As recorded in Judges 4:4-5:31, Deborah relays the word of God to Barak:

“Go and gather your men toward Mount Tabor, and take with you 10,000 men of the children of Naphtali and Zebulun. And I shall draw to you, to the brook Kishon, Sisera, the chieftain of Jabin’s army, with his chariots and his multitude; and I will give him into your hand.”

We toured Israel, including the holy cities of Jerusalem and Safed, the center of Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah that always hold a special place in my heart. Next we traveled across the Sinai Peninsula by bus, crossed the Suez Canal and arrived in bustling Cairo. We toured Egypt and flew back to the United States.

My understanding of the world changed after that visit to the Holy Land. I realized for the first time that America is a young country with a lot to learn and that there is a big world beyond our borders. I also became a Zionist on my trip. My bar mitzvah speech was about the contrasts between largely Christian America and Jewish Israel, and how for the first time in my life I was surrounded by millions of “members of the tribe,” my people. I was in a country where you could be confident and secure as a Jew.

Trekking to the top of Mount Tabor and looking upon the Jezreel Valley as Barak did thousands of years ago made my haftarah portion come alive. No money, no gift could eclipse or even equal what my experience on Mount Tabor meant to me.

jmarks@midatlanticmedia.com
@JoshMarks78

Photo by David Stuck

Do I have to have a bar/bat mitzvah?

If you mean, do you need to have a ceremony where you read from the Torah, give a speech and have a big party afterward, no you don’t. A boy automatically becomes a bar mitzvah – literally “son of the commandment” – when he turns 13. A girl becomes a bat mitzvah – “daughter of the commandment” – at 12, with or without a ceremony. The milestone marks moment when young Jews become obligated to perform mitzvot.

What’s the point of a bar/bat  mitzvah ceremony?

Who doesn’t love a party? The ceremony itself, usually integrated into Shabbat morning services, is an opportunity for the bar or bat mitzvah (the person, not the ceremony) to show off their Jewish religious chops. It arose during the Middle Ages when boys (only) were called to the Torah as a way of recognizing their entry into religious manhood.

The first bat mitzvah ceremony was in 1921. The bat mitzvah girl, Judith Kaplan, was the daughter of Mordecai Kaplan, a Conservative rabbi and founder of Reconstructionist Judaism.

Why does a bar/bat mitzvah read Torah and haftarah?

Since at least the Middle Ages it has been customary to call the bar mitzvah to the Torah to confirm his Jewish manhood. Then, with the son having accepted his adult responsibilities, the father said this blessing: Baruch sheptarani mei-onsho shelazeh. “Blessed is He who has freed me from responsibility for this boy.”

Today a bar or bat mitzvah will chant the blessings, all or part of that week’s Torah portion and the haftarah, or weekly section from the prophetic books. (By the way, the words “Torah” and “haftarah” are not related.)

Why is there a speech?

The d’var Torah, or speech, may have arisen in 16th century Poland, where highly capable boys demonstrated their Talmudic erudition. The practice spread to all boys, often with help from a teacher who would write the d’var for the boy to read.

Today, boys and girls are encouraged to write their own speeches, with some guidance from the rabbi. Parental fingerprints on the speech are frowned upon.

A typical speech includes thoughts on the Torah portion and what it means to the bar or bat mitzvah, some words on their mitzvah project and thanks to family and friends, usually with a reference to a younger sibling that includes the phrase, “even though s/he drives me crazy.”

Do I have to do it this way?

No, you don’t. There are no ancient rabbinic rules stating what a bar or bat mitzvah has to be like. It’s all custom and tradition.

If you don’t belong to a synagogue, you can hire an independent rabbi to facilitate your service.

If the Shabbat morning service is too long, how about a ceremony during the Shabbat afternoon service, which also has a Torah reading? So does the morning service for Rosh Chodesh, the “head of the month.” Rosh Chodesh today is celebrated as a holiday for women, a good time for a bat mitzvah.

Adventure Rabbi (adventurerabbi.org) offers bar and bat mitzvah programs including distance learning via Skype and “adventures” including peak climbing and snowshoeing in Boulder, Colo.

To seek out green alternatives, try Jews United for Justice’s “Green and Just Celebrations Guide” (jufj.org/content/green-and-just-celebrations-guide).

I’m done now, right?

If all goes well, you’re just beginning. Just as with school or any of your other activities, you can build on what you’ve learned for your bar or bat mitzvah as you grow older. A skill you learned or some piece of Jewish knowledge might stick with you and suddenly become really important later on. Don’t think of what you say in your speech as the last word on the subject. Think of it as closer to the first.

dholzel@midatlanticmedia.com
@davidholzel

Rachel Meira Friedman, daughter of Amy and Michael, will become a bat mitzvah on Sept. 3 at Congregation Olam Tikvah in Fairfax. She will read Torah from parashat Re’eh. Rachel is an eighth grader at Gesher Jewish Day School. For her bat mitzvah project, Rachel has been collecting donations for and organizing groups to volunteer at A Wider Circle, a Silver Spring-based organization that fights poverty. Rachel is excited to celebrate her bat mitzvah with family and friends, and especially with her grandmother Raye Wildfeuer. Rachel is also the granddaughter of Meyer Wildfeuer z”l, who was a Holocaust survivor, and Edwin and Vivian Friedman z”l.

Adas Israel
Adam Crausman

B’nai Israel Congregation
Alex Michael Sklar
Judith Brittney Altneu
Dahlia Marie Frier

B’nai Shalom of Olney
Joshua Kram

Beth Sholom Congregation
and Talmud Torah
Joshua Liebstein

Congregation B’nai Tzedek
Nicole Weisman
Zachary L. Rosen

Congregation Beth El of Montgomery County
Lila Hoffman-Byer
Madeline Molyneux

Congregation Beth Emeth
Jared Tankel

Congregation Har Shalom
Danielle Klein

Kol Shalom
Shana Laine
Shaare Tefila
Anna Sapcariu

Shaare Torah
Mitchell Wasserman

Temple Beth Ami
Jeremy Golub
Jacob Glazier
Joshua Levine

Temple Emanuel
Sara Reff
Rebecca Davids

Temple Micah
Noah Freedman
Temple Rodef Shalom
Lily Hannah Karp

Temple Shalom
Anton Putterman

Temple Sinai
Micah Hurewitz
Aaron Shoham

Tifereth Israel
Eli Mayer

Candy is dandy, but “13-year-old friends of a bar mitzvah boy tend to get competitive” when you give them free reign to start throwing stuff at the guest of honor.

That’s the experience Rabbi Gilah Langner of Kol Ami, a Reconstructionist Jewish community in Northern Virginia, has had with the custom of showering the bar or bat mitzvah with candy during the Torah service.
The custom’s purpose, Langner says, is to “shower them with sweetness” similar to the tradition of putting honey on a Jewish child’s first schoolbook, “so they’ll associate learning with sweetness.”

“We definitely do it at all bar and bat mitzvahs at our shul, and for aufrufs [an aliyah for a groom before his wedding] as well,” says Maharat Ruth Balinsky Friedman, of Ohev Sholom – The National Synagogue, an Orthodox congregation. “We make sure to stick to [gelatin candies], though, for safety and hygiene.”

(In non-Orthodox synagogues, the bridegroom and bride-to-be participate together in the aufruf.)

Throwing sweets at a b’nai mitzvah originated with an ancient practice of throwing fruit on Shavuot and Simchat Torah, according to Rabbi Binyamin Shlomo Hamburger, an Israeli-based expert on the customs of German and Western European Jews.

“Some view [throwing sweets at a groom] as an outgrowth of the custom to throw fruits on Simchat Torah,” he writes in “Shorshei Minhag Ashkenaz,” a collection of essays detailing the heritage of Jews from Eastern and Central Europe. “The emergence of the custom to throw sweets at grooms also led to the practice of throwing candies at a bar mitzvah boy when he is called to the Torah.”

Not everyone is in favor of the custom.

“Some communities frowned upon the practice of throwing candies because it entailed an unnecessary expense, and there were Sephardic rabbis who forbade it because of the physical harm it could cause to people in the synagogue,” Hamburger writes.

Langner says rabbis “usually plead in advance with congregants to use a gentle throwing arm to shower the bar or bat mitzvah with sweetness.”

jkatz@midatlanticmedia.com

One thing all Jews seem to agree on is that a child’s passage into adulthood must be celebrated by the boy or girl being lifted several feet off of the ground in a chair and enthusiastically danced around. But why?

“In the Bible, Israelites use dance as a form of religious expression,” Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer writes for My Jewish Learning. “Because of the mitzvah (commandment) to celebrate a bride and groom, dancing at Jewish weddings was always encouraged.”

How did it become a custom for 12- and 13-year-old children? Writing in the Forward, Lenore Skenazy noted “the chair lift at bar mitzvahs seems to have become popularized only in the past generation or two.”

Perhaps as the cost of b’nai mitzvah began to approach that of weddings, the chair dance more easily hopped from one simcha, or celebration, to the other.

Rabbi Craig Axler, of Temple Isaiah in Howard County, says that b’nai mitzvah-to-be have confided in him their anxiety about the custom.

“But being a little afraid is really part of the reason for being lifted in the chair,” he said, noting a link between the joy of a simcha and fear.”

He explained that “the pull of the hora” — the traditional circle dance where brides, grooms, and bar and bat mitzvah kids are raised on chairs — “is that we are being stretched in all directions.  Time is moving faster than we like, which means we are also speeding up the eventual end of our lives,” he said.

The dance itself likely originated in Eastern Europe, where several countries have variations of circle dances that predate what Israelis and American Jews call the hora.

Baruch Agadati, born in 1895 in what is now Moldova, is credited with choreographing today’s hora in 1924, basing it on a Romanian circle dance.

So why the chair?

Rabbi Yitzchak Rosenbaum, associate director of the National Jewish Outreach Program, told the Forward about the Talmudic story of Rabbi Acha, who danced with a bride on his shoulders.
When other men asked if they could do the same, Rosenbaum told the Forward, Rabbi Acha threw in a contingency: You can do it only if, to you, “the bride is like a piece of wood.”
jkatz@midatlanticmedia.com

Building a library in Sebba became a family endeavor for the Greeleys, from left, Sali, Ethan and David.
Photo by Justin Katz

When Ethan Greeley started brainstorming ideas for his bar mitzvah project in 2013, he thought about Burkina Faso, a landlocked West African country similar in size to Colorado.

Ethan’s mother, Sali Greeley, grew up there, in a village called Sebba in the country’s northeast. It was a village that lacked many things that Ethan, growing up in Bethesda, takes for granted.

Like a library. Whenever Ethan balked at going to the neighborhood library, his mother reminded him, “If I had a library growing up, it would have been very different — so don’t take it for granted,” Sali says.

The family is sitting together in their living room. There is an atlas on the coffee table. The décor uses earthy browns and reds invoking African culture. Burkina Faso’s flag — its red and green bars punctuated by a yellow star in the center — hangs from the ceiling in another room.

It wasn’t until Ethan began thinking what bar mitzvah project he wanted to do — something out of the ordinary — that his mom’s nudging about libraries clicked. Suddenly he had an idea.

“I can build a library in her village,” he says, recalling that moment.

Initially, Sali and her husband, David, had reservations about the project. But in April 2016, three years after Ethan’s aha moment, the library opened.

The library is modest, with one central room holding shelves for books. There’s a desk for the sole librarian, some tables and rows of chairs.

The library has become a popular spot for the village’s children, according to Sali Greeley.
Photos courtesy of the Greeleys

So how does an American teenager build a library in West Africa? The project became “a family endeavor with Ethan taking the lead,” says David.

The first task was confirming that the village even wanted a library. Sali, who was familiar with the local politics and government, acted as the intermediary, meeting with the key officials who needed to sign off. Enthused with the idea, the local government offered an abandoned building that could be refurbished, says Sali.

Meanwhile, Ethan began volunteering at Bethesda’s Davis Library to learn understand how libraries operate. The boy who balked at going to the library was now trying to become an expert.

The Greeleys then contacted Friends of African Village Libraries, a nonprofit organization that manages libraries in rural Africa. The group told the family that turning the abandoned building into a library would cost $15,000.

To raise the funds, Ethan pitched his project to his synagogue, Temple Emanuel in Kensington, which made a contribution. He also gave a portion of his bar mitzvah money to the library, which the New Jersey-based Merck pharmaceuticals company matched. (David is retired from the company, which offers its retirees matches for money donated to nonprofits.)

Friends of African Village Libraries, based in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, was able to do what the Greeleys could not from Bethesda: hiring a librarian, buying furniture and stocking the shelves with books.

Ethan cites two Jewish values inherent to his project.

“Learning and helping other people,” he says. “I’m helping other people trying to learn. It’s kind of putting the two into one.”
Ethan and David have not been able to visit the library, due to a State Department warning against traveling to Burkina Faso after a kidnapping near the border with Niger and armed assailants attacking a hotel in the capital city.

Now a year after his bar mitzvah, Ethan continues to work on his project. He still corresponds, by email and phone, with the library’s staff and Friends of African Village Libraries. He hopes that one day the library will generate electricity using solar panels.

Ethan says Burkina Faso’s low literacy rate was another reason he wanted to build a library there. Only 35 percent of people older than 15 are literate, according to a 2015 UNESCO report, the 4th lowest literacy rate of the 115 countries listed.

“I hope people here realize everyone around the world deserves the same amount of education,” Ethan says.
Then, sounding like his mother, he adds, “In my mom’s country, people don’t have that opportunity.”

jkatz@midatlanticmedia.com

Vanessa Bayer plays Jacob the Bar Mitzvah Boy on “Saturday Night Live.” Screen shot from NBC.

You probably don’t need to have seen Vanessa Bayer’s portrayal of Jacob the Bar Mitzvah Boy on “Saturday Night Live” to get the joke.

Jacob is a commentator on the show’s Weekend Update segment, invited to speak on something Jewish (Passover, for instance). But when co-host Michael Che tries to engage in the kind of small talk most adults find natural, Jacob — curly haired, smooth faced and sporting his New York Yankees kippah — does nothing but look down and launch into his prepared speech, thanking parents, grandparents and siblings, with an inside joke about Papa John’s Pizza thrown in.

“You don’t have to make a speech, like at your bar mitzvah,” Che offers. “We can just hang out and talk, like friends.”

“The other symbolic foods include the shank bone,” Jacob responds.

It’s a comical illustration of the many challenges of the bar or bat mitzvah speech. Teenagers are not only expected to internalize and connect deeply with scripture, they’re expected to get up in a sanctuary full of people and talk about it at an age when their self-consciousness is heightened.

“The great irony is that the time when most individuals don’t want to be in front of people speaking is the time when, as a tradition, we ask our teens to be in front of a large group of people,” says Rabbi Steven Rein of Agudas Achim Congregation in Alexandria. “They’re extremely sensitive of what other people say and are thinking of them. They’re working out their own insecurities about who I am as an individual.”

There may be no amount of preparation that can help a 13-year-old overcome his or her insecurities. In most cases only age can do that, Rein says. But at congregations like Agudas Achim, pre-b’nai mitzvah students are helped to work through their fear of public speaking little by little.

Rein invites his students to lead Shabbat service in the run up to the big day. If nothing else, he says, they get comfortable with the sensation of being on the bima in front of a couple hundred people.

“They learn, ‘Yeah, I can stand in front of a few hundred people and it’s OK,’” he says.

Coaching delivery, though, poses yet another challenge. We’ve all seen or experienced it at one point; adolescent anxiety manifesting itself in hurried speech or a low mumble.

Rabbis have different techniques they try to impart on their students. Rabbi David Kalender of Congregation Olam Tikvah in Fairfax starts with an assumption that any boy or girl will read too quickly and not clearly enough.

He encourages his students to slow down from whatever cadence they feel is normal and simply open their mouths wider to project. And then he asks parents to record their child practicing the speech. When they listen back, they can usually pick up on what they’re doing well and what needs work.

As for the substance of their speech, Rein teaches his students to open with something a bit novel to grab the listener. It’s not unlike any other form of writing, so he brings in examples from what they’re reading in school.

“If you start with, ‘My parsha is…,’ that’s a cue for people to nod off. If you begin with some kind of hook or story, people are going to listen,” Rein says.

When helping a teen craft a speech, a parent or spiritual leader shouldn’t assume that all they can relate it to is what happened to them at school.
“They’re capable of seeing broader than, ‘this happened to me in the hallways of middle school,’” Kalender says. “You have to help them think a little bit bigger and realize that they’re plugged into the rest of the world.”

Of course, the bar or bat mitzvah is a young teenager. “When you step back and think about it, it’s absolutely wild what we ask 13-year-olds to do,” Kalender says. “You’re 13 and we now want you to sing in your second or third language. We ask you to interpret one of the best known documents in the world when it seems like everyone knows it better, and we ask you to be our teacher on that day. Sometimes they’re going to mumble and not say the most dramatic things. That’s who they are at that age.”

Making it through the entire process is an accomplishment in and of itself. Holding such a wide audience’s attention is just icing on the cake. Or, as Jacob the Bar Mitzvah Boy might say, the Papa John’s Pizza.

jforetek@midatlanticmedia.com

Amanda Paull, right, and Alix Hyatt, second from right, gather with friends after their 2016 b’not mitzvah on Birthright.
Photo courtesy of Amanda Paull

Amanda Paull, 21, was raised in a Catholic home with a Catholic mother and Jewish father. In her hometown of Northbrook, Ill., north of Chicago, she attended church regularly with her mother and two siblings.

And yet in May 2016, Paull stood on a bima in a Jerusalem hotel next to four other college students. Overwhelmed with nerves and excitement, they recited in unison the blessing for an aliya to the Torah. At an informal ceremony, Paull and the others became bar and bat mitzvah.

“It was a really spiritual experience to have my bat mitzvah in Jerusalem.” Paull said. “I felt like I was a part of the religion.”

The five, and another 120 college students who witnessed the ceremony, were on a 10-day Birthright trip to Israel. Birthright did not answer a request for information about b’nai mitzvah during its tours. But those who take part, like Paull, had little or no exposure to Judaism growing up. For them, the Jewish rite of passage complemented their first trip to the Jewish homeland.

“It was probably the first time in Jewish history anyone showed up to their bar mitzvah service sunburned and a little hungover,” Stephanie Butnick wrote in Tablet about a service she attended on Birthright in 2012. “But there was no doubt that this was a special moment.

“Special mostly because many of the 12 participants in the service had very little interaction with Judaism growing up, and most hadn’t considered getting bar mitzvahed at all when they were teenagers.

This morning each of them opted to take part in a Jewish ritual that had been a requisite part of my Jewish upbringing.”

Paull said her perspective on religion came mainly from her mother, who attended Catholic school throughout her childhood, while Paull’s father was uninvolved in their religious upbringing.

Paull lived this way until she was 15, when her maternal grandmother, the main religious influence in the family, died.

“At that point, it was kind of like whatever we wanted to believe in, [my parents] would support,” she said.

While Paull was always curious about Judaism, she finally felt confident to investigate, but wasn’t sure how to begin.

Then, during her freshman year at the University of Maryland, she joined the Jewish sorority Sigma Delta Tau, and her exploration began.

“I grew up with tons of Jewish people and most of my friends in SDT are Jewish, so over time I’ve learned a lot about the religion through conversations with them,” she said.

Paull began attending events at the Hillel student center with her sorority sisters and participating in Shabbat services. She found herself yearning to explore Judaism more deeply.

At the end of Paull’s sophomore year, many of her friends began preparing for their summer Birthright trip. Paull wanted to join.

“I already felt much stronger about Judaism than I ever did about Catholicism, so I used this as a way to learn more about myself and my newly found Jewish culture,” she said.

When her trip coordinator asked their group if anyone was interested in having a bar or bat mitzvah, Paull hesitantly agreed. “I started thinking about the fact that I was confirmed Catholic when I was younger and didn’t truly understand the concept of religion, and I saw this as a way to honor my dad’s side of the family as I had already honored my mom’s.”

In the week before the ceremony, she met with her trip coordinator multiple times. She learned the Torah blessings and prepared a speech about her evolving connection to Judaism.

One of the other participants on the bima was Alix Hyatt, 21, of Baltimore, who took advantage of this opportunity for a different reason than Paull.

Hyatt grew up in a Conservative home and Judaism played a significant role in her life, she said. She
attended High Holiday services every year and celebrated her bat mitzvah the day before her 13th birthday.

But once she began attending the University of Maryland, Hyatt found herself struggling to incorporate Judaism into her life. Her full schedule kept her from attending High Holiday services.

A few months before Hyatt’s Birthright trip, her grandfather died. “It has always been his dream to have his grandchildren bar and bat mitzvahed in Israel,” she said, “so I decided to get re-bat mitzvahed to honor him and his memory.”

She added, “Being in Jerusalem, the holiest city in the world, and standing on a bima, was one of the most incredible experiences ever.”

As Hyatt and Paull stepped off the bima after the service, each experienced different emotions. Paull had a newfound appreciation and understanding for her father’s Jewish heritage. Hyatt had a familiar feeling of closeness to her family and the religion that has been part of her life for as long as she can remember.

With the current trend toward more individualized and streamlined meals, there are fewer buffets at bar and bat mitzvah parties.

“The trend has always been to serve the adults at the function a dinner and have a buffet for the kids,” said Alan Weiss, owner of Alan Weiss Catering in Washington. “Now the trend is for everyone to have stations, where everyone takes everything they want.”

Part of what’s driving the change is that kids’ tastes are more sophisticated than they used to be, he said. They want more than chicken tenders and French fries.

The flip side of that is that now adults can be like big kids when it comes to digging into the food
stations.

The sky’s the limit for what the stations might contain, but some of the regulars are a carving station, sliders — mini-hamburgers and mini-hot dogs, for example — sweet potatoes, tacos, salad bar, stir-fry vegetables and international foods. Other favorites are omelet, panini and waffle stations.

Then there’s the dessert bar, which might offer mini-French pastries or gourmet cotton candy — the latter becoming increasingly popular.

“The trend anyway has been toward the less formal, and stations are more informal than a sit-down dinner, especially for a bar or bat mitzvah,” said Weiss. “This gives everyone more choices, and they enjoy it more.”

But stations can also be more sophisticated in what they offer — even if less formal than a dinner — and more reliant on the way foods are presented.

Tastes in both food and presentation seem to have become both more sophisticated and more informal.

That seemed to be true of the food at the bar mitzvah of Elyon Topolosky, a student at the Berman Academy, in September. Candy bars and licorice were served in clear glasses. Ice cream bars were on the menu.

But the bar mitzvah celebration also had healthy appetizers and entrees, according to Elyon’s mother, Dahlia Topolosky.

“We served quinoa dishes, trendy salads and deconstructed salad bars, so guests could make their own,” she said.

Another advantage of stations is that guests can make return trips as often as they’d like. And at many bar and bat mitzvah celebrations they can also enjoy the convenience of roaming carts of food.

Of course, all this may require more creativity to go along with the variety.

Ravi Narayanan, executive chef at Potomac 18, a kosher catering company in Rockville, said his goal is to make the food at bar and bat mitzvah celebrations “fun and interactive, so children who may not have been fans of vegetables such as cauliflower, beets, or asparagus get their hands on them and say they’ve never had vegetables like these before.”

Narayanan said he has no set menu — his way of food creation is to compose from scratch — but will ask families what they like to eat — and where they like to eat out.

“I don’t think kids go to other bar/bat mitzvah parties thinking that they’re going to have their own party next year and decide then what they’d like to eat,” he said. “So, you can take the fun foods they like and are familiar with and showcase them in different ways.”

Boys and girls approaching their milestone with a sweet tooth, might want to make donuts the centerpiece of their dessert table.

Duck Donuts — with seven locations in the Washington area — offers doughy confectionaries in more variations than the mind can conjure up. You can choose the standard donuts, or made-to-order ones, choosing coating, topping, and drizzle according to your taste.

“They’re freshly made, and could be delivered as part of our catering line, which is a decent percentage of our business,” said Travis Gafford, general manager.

There’s no limitation on quantity, he added. The company has delivered 60 dozen donuts to one event.

That’s 840 holes.

Barbara Trainin Blank is a Washington-area writer.

Leah Sachs practices for her bat mitzvah with her mother, Heather.
Photo by Jared Foretek

Leah Sachs sits with her mother at their dining room table, proudly showing off her bat mitzvah workbook, and opens to a printout of her Torah portion. The typeface is a bit bigger than normal, but it’s all there, and Leah doesn’t need a second prompting to practice, launching into a spirited Hebrew recitation of Pekudei from the Book of Exodus.

“These are the numbers of the Mishkan, the Mishkan of the Testimony, which were counted at Moses’ command; [this was] the work of the Levites under the direction of Itamar, the son of Aaron the Kohen…”

More than a month out from her big day, she’s got this thing down.

Thirteen years earlier, her mother, Heather, wasn’t sure that day would come. She was sitting in that same dining room with Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt of Congregation B’nai Tzedek, having given birth to Leah days earlier. But Leah hadn’t come home with her; she was still at the hospital, where doctors were monitoring some heart problems. She’d also been diagnosed with Down Syndrome.

Heather was blindsided, doctors hadn’t been able to diagnose the condition prenatally. But late that evening, Weinblatt was there to offer comfort and reassurance.

“He said to me, ‘You have a place here, and she will have a bat mitzvah if you want her to. We will make it happen.”

On March 9, that day will arrive.

“The rabbi will call my Hebrew name, my sister will sing with me and the rabbi, and my brother will do the haftorah,” Leah says excitedly. “I’m doing prayers and the Torah portion and a d’var Torah. It’s about a girl who died in the Holocaust.”

Leah says she’s nervous and excited, but the excitement is palpable. She loves cheerleading, so—naturally—that will be the theme of the party. She lights up when talking about the guest list: friends, family and especially au pairs (one flying in from Colombia, another from Germany, and her current au pair, who’s been with the family for two years.)

And if she gets nervous during the service, she has a plan.

“I’ll stand, like, really high on the bimah with the rabbi,” Leah says. “And he’s gonna say a prayer and hug me.”

‘She believes in me’

If a bat mitzvah is fundamentally about transformation, Leah’s is as transformative as it gets.

Just by her presence and enthusiasm for learning, she’s changed the entire B’nai Tzedek synagogue. Weinblatt says that before she was born, the synagogue’s experience with special needs children was limited. Today, it has an inclusivity committee and offers additional religious school help for kids who need it.

Those improvements were largely spearheaded by Heather. An entertainment lawyer at the time of Leah’s birth, she dove headfirst into volunteer work on behalf of Down Syndrome advocacy groups and started the synagogue’s committee with a friend whose child is on the Autism spectrum. Then, a few years later, she began a whole new career path, taking a job lobbying lawmakers for the National Down Syndrome Group, a nonprofit advocacy group.

“Having a child with a disability has changed my whole perspective on life. It sounds cheesy, but it’s true,” Heather says. “What’s important and what your priorities are as a family and professionally.”

She and her husband, Andrew, were both Ivy League graduates with high-powered jobs in Washington. In short, Heather says, aspirations and expectations for their three children (Leah has an older brother named Jonah and a younger sister named Talia) have always been high.

“Having a child with an intellectual disability was particularly difficult at first,” Heather says. “But I pretty quickly came to realize that the most important thing is not necessarily success in the way it’s traditionally defined, but being a good person, contributing to the community. Time and time again, she’s surprised me and surpassed any type of limitations I’ve even put on her.”

When it came time to really dig into her bat mitzvah preparations, the family got creative. Heather and the synagogue’s inclusivity committee got donations from congregants to bring Sunday school classroom aides in for children with special needs, and Leah was progressing with her Hebrew. She’d also developed a close bond with a religious school teacher, Renee Young.

Despite having no formal training in special needs education, Young clicked with her pupil and took on the role of bat mitzvah tutor with the help of the synagogue’s cantor. She’d bring in wax sticks to help Leah learn the Hebrew letters, pin words to a billboard and have Leah go and grab them, always keeping her engaged.

Leah beams about Young.

“She’s so active, and all my Torah portion and speeches are really big. She helps me,” Leah says. “And she believes in me.”

Celebrating as a congregation

When it came time to finally pick a date, though, Heather still wasn’t sure a Saturday morning service would be best. So she signed Leah up for a calmer Havdalah service instead. Soon after, she got a call. It was Weinblatt.

“He said, ‘Are you kidding? We want to celebrate as a congregation. We want her to participate in a Saturday morning service, and we’ll do whatever it takes to make it happen.’ So I said, ‘OK.’”

According to Heather, the kind of support and accommodation B’nai Tzedek provided is not necessarily the norm at synagogues. Through her volunteer work with the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, she knows things are improving, but there’s a lot of room to be more inclusive.

She knows families who left synagogues because they didn’t feel welcome, all while Leah and her family felt perfectly at home in theirs.

“It can be something like having a child with Autism who might sit in Saturday morning service flapping, and that’s just a way to calm themselves down or even express joy at the music, but parents are getting dirty looks from other congregants or even by the rabbi,” Heather says. “It just makes you feel like you don’t even want to take your family in the door there.”

Nonetheless, Heather says that if parents want their child to have a Jewish education and to celebrate big milestones like a bat or bar mitzvah, they shouldn’t be scared.

“I hope parents will take that leap of faith and reach out to their clergy or the Federation and see how they can make it happen,” she says.

Leah’s memorized some of her Torah portion, but she can read Hebrew, Heather says. After she gets through practicing for the night — having seamlessly recited her Torah portion — her mother wants to make sure she understands what she’s saying.

“What’s the message?” Heather asks. “That God…”

“Is always with me,” Leah responds.

jforetek@midatlanticmedia.com

The post How Leah Sachs changed her synagogue appeared first on Washington Jewish Week.

The big reveal: Jessica Daninhirsch sees that her bat mitzvah video is more than just a montage of her life.
Photos by Amy Rodgers

I’d been keeping a secret from my daughter.

A colossal one.

In 2016, for a nine-month period, I had been working on a project that, had this been a CIA operation, would have been designated as highly classified, top secret and I’d-tell-you-but-then-I’d-have-to kill-you.

The project involved covert communications by email and letter, creating hidden file folders on the family computer and your basic espionage.

Finally, though, the day was here: Oct. 22, 2016. Sure, it was my daughter’s long-awaited bat mitzvah and that, of course, was a meaningful milestone. But I confess that when I woke up that day, my first thought was, “Today is the big reveal! I can’t wait for her to see the video!”

All of this subterfuge for a bat mitzvah video.

A bit of background:

My daughter, Jessica, had been training in gymnastics for several years and was on the competition circuit. It was purely for recreation — she had no intention of going into the big leagues, but she loved the sport. She knew the names of all of the Olympic gymnasts, past and present, and even the Olympic hopefuls. On a summer vacation to Colorado in 2015, we stopped at the Olympic training center in Colorado Springs and watched the men’s practice — she knew everyone, even the ones who weren’t household names yet.

When we started planning her bat mitzvah, it was a no-brainer that gymnastics would be the theme of her party; specifically, “Jessica’s Invitational.” Jessica worked alongside us to help plan and design everything from the table settings (each one represented by a different gymnast and featuring facts about them), to the welcome sign to the cake baked by my sister-in-law, replete with fondant balance beams and tiny gymnast figurines.

She also helped design the invitations: at the top, in her favorite colors, were five Jewish stars linked together, reminiscent of five linked Olympic rings, along with our logo of a gymnast balancing on elbows, legs in the air.

Individually wrapped chocolate lollypops, imprinted with an image of a gymnast in motion, served double duty as favors and table numbers.

We planned to show a video to our guests during dessert; my husband worked for months to create a sweet montage of Jessica through the years, all set to meaningful music.

Though she didn’t know it, our video was going to knock her Converse socks off.

Early in the year, I reached out to Jessica’s favorite gymnasts and asked if they could record a short video, congratulating her on her bat mitzvah, or perhaps encouraging her in her gymnastics training.

Short of cyber-stalking anyone, I researched where the gymnast trained, if they had a personal website or Facebook page, if they had an agent or a PR person, etc. I emailed some of them, either directly or through their gyms, and wrote good old-fashioned, heartfelt letters to others.

I did not expect to hear back from anyone — after all, these are busy athletes, and 2016 was a summer Olympics year — why would they take the time out of their day to record a video for a stranger?

On a cold day in January, I sent my first email out to Jake Dalton, who was on the men’s Olympic team.

Within two hours, I received a video response from him; jumping up and down alone in my house, I hoped that no neighbors would walk past my window as I processed this initial victory.

After about six months, we received 13 videos out of about three-dozen requests. We buried the videos in the computer with disguised titles.

Some of them were very sweet — Laurie Hernandez and Nia Dennis made the videos personal, incorporating facts about Jessica and things that they had in common with her.

Other responders included Jordyn Wieber, Maggie Nichols and Sam Mikulak.

When I received a video back from Gabby Douglas, I remember running upstairs to babble incoherently at my husband, who was home sick at the time, dragging him out of bed to come downstairs and see it for himself.

Other gymnasts were more difficult to reach.

Despite many requests, I never heard from Jessica’s favorite gymnast, Nastia Liukin. It’s quite possible that she pegged me as crazy lady and thought I would go away if she ignored me. I also tried my best to get in touch with Aly Raisman, our fellow Jewish gymnast, but to no avail.

Still, we had a good amount of gymnasts representing Team USA. We tacked the gymnast video on to the very end of the main video; after it ended, there was a short pause, after which you could hear the Olympic music in the background with a message that said “Wait!! Nobody Go Anywhere! A few special folks want to say a little something…”

I also tipped off my photographer in advance that this was a moment to be captured on film, and she managed to shoot some great pictures of Jessica in various stages of awe! And there may have been a few (i.e., a river) of mom tears shed that day as well.

An incredible coincidence occurred the next day, making the weekend all the more memorable:

Jessica wanted to see the Kellogg’s Tour of Gymnastics Champions, which was to take place the day after her bat mitzvah, but we both agreed that it would be too much in one weekend. But about 10 days before the bat mitzvah, Jessica’s coach invited her (and several other teammates) to learn a floor routine and perform at the opening ceremony of that very event. We decided it would be a nice reward for all of that bat mitzvah prep, so Jessica left her bat mitzvah brunch early to head down the arena.

In addition to learning and performing a cool floor routine, she got to participate in a “chalk talk” with some of the participating gymnasts, including the elusive Nastia Liukin and Aly Raisman.

After the show was over, some of the gymnasts came out on the floor to sign autographs, including none other than Nastia Liukin, who signed Jessica’s book and took a selfie with her. We even met Brandon Wynn, who was one of the gymnasts that filmed a video for her.

Although two years have passed, I can still picture her face and her reaction to the video, and it never fails to get my tear ducts going. That moment, when she first saw and heard Jake Dalton saying, “Hi, Jessica, Jake Dalton here!” was absolutely priceless.

And I can use it as leverage forever.

Hilary Daninhirsch is a freelance writer in Pittsburgh.

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