Bar Mitzvah, a History

4. Jewish Confirmation

74 Chapter Four Jewish Confirmation • In the nineteenth century Jewish confirmation ceremonies were based on a “catechism”—giving formal answers to formal questions about Judaism. • Leopold Zunz was one of the first Jews to be confirmed; the ceremony took place in 1807 at his Jewish day school. He later became a famous scholar and recorded the date himself. • Confirmation has often been held at Shavuot, going back to 1811. Protestant confirmations were held at the parallel Christian festival of Pentecost . • From 1810 through the 1970s many rabbis and leaders promoted confirmation as more meaningful than bar mitzvah. Bar mitzvah was often abolished in favor of confirmation. • Confirmation reached Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1820s and New York in 1846. • In the twentieth century the age for confirmation rose from thirteen to fifteen or sixteen or occasionally even older. • Confirmation has been in decline since bat mitzvah became popular in the 1970s. • In 1981 the Liberal Jewish Synagogue, London, became the last known congregation to bring back bar mitzvah. Early in the nineteenth century a new Jewish coming-of-age ceremony was invented in Germany, known as “confirmation.” Originally a graduation ceremony for a Jewish day school class, this soon came to be a synagogue ceremony, often held for a group at the festival of Shavuot and involving both boys and girls. This was the first time in Jewish history that any coming-of-age ceremony had been offered to girls. In synagogues that adopted the new ceremony, it typically replaced bar mitzvah completely. Fig. 3. Part of the program for the first confirmation service at Tifereth Israel, Cleveland, held on Erev Shavuot, 1896. The service was led by Rabbi Moses Gries (Weidenthal, “Confirmations in Cleveland”). Photograph courtesy of the TempleTifereth Israel Archive, Cleveland oh. 76 jewish confirmation Although today it is offered mainly by Reform temples, in the past it was also popular in Conservative and even Orthodox synagogues. A New Ceremony for a New Era of Freedom Confirmation began as a ceremony that differed from bar mitzvah in that it required a declaration of faith by the child and did not normally involve being called to the reading of the Torah. Passing an exam before confirmation was essential from the start. Unlike bar mitzvah, confirmation has never emphasized the rituals of Judaism but began as a celebration of an entry point to participation in the wider society—becoming an adult in the civic and public sphere. By the 1820s it was invariably a group ceremony , held annually at the age of thirteen for boys, at the age of twelve for girls, or for a mixed group. In the early twentieth century the age of confirmation rose from thirteen to fifteen or even higher, in parallel with the raising of school leaving ages. Jewish confirmation has never had any set form. At first the children, as part of the ceremony, were expected to give rehearsed answers to questions about their faith. An early example from 1813 shows the nature of this exchange: Q. What does religion mean to you? A. To believe in God and to do His will . . . That there is an invisible and inexplicable being that has been there forever and that is the creator, the King and preserver of the whole world. Q. What does invisible and inexplicable mean? A. God is a being that we can neither see with our eyes nor understand with our senses . . . God is the originator of the whole world; He made everything out of nothing; He wanted it to be, and it was.1 This question-and-answer format had been used by Protestant and Catholic churches since the Reformation and was called a “catechism.” The first Jewish catechism was not written for synagogue use but as an educational manual for children. Lekach Tov by Abraham Jagel was published in Hebrew in Venice in 1595, around the time that bar mitzvah first reached Venice. It was soon translated into several languages. One edition was published in England in 1679 with the original Hebrew and a Latin translation on the facing page. Jagel provided simple questions and jewish confirmation 77 answers that a child or a non-Jew could easily understand. Although the Hebrew title means “good doctrine,” the Latin title Catechismus suggests that already by this time the book was attracting a non-Jewish readership. Unlike the nineteenth-century examples, which are based on beliefs and principles, Jagel emphasized...