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106 Chapter Five Bat Mitzvah • The first known synagogue coming-of-age ceremony for Jewish girls was held for a Miss Bevern and a Miss Bernsdorf at the Beer Temple in Berlin in 1817. • In 1847, at a similar ceremony in Leipzig, Rabbi Adolf Jellinek used a German equivalent of the phrase bat mitzvah to describe the girls. • Since 1901 annual ceremonies for girls were held in Alexandria, Egypt, and continued every year until the Jewish community left for Israel in the 1950s. • In the United States some girls started to read the Ten Commandments from a Torah scroll during their confirmation ceremonies as long ago as the 1890s. • Ida Blum (b. 1908), from Calumet, Michigan, claimed later in life to have had her own individual bat mitzvah. This would have been before Judith Kaplan’s famous New York ceremony in 1922. • Ceremonies for girls took place in Berlin when the Nazis were in power. Rabbi Manfred Swarsensky called Alice Redlich to the Torah at the New Synagogue on Prinzregentstrasse in 1936. Her certificate has been found to prove it. • In the 1960s many American Reform rabbis wanted to halt the spread of bat mitzvah, claiming that it would double their workload to include girls along with the boys. On March 28, 1922, Mordecai Kaplan, the rabbi of the new Society for the Advancement of Judaism in New York, wrote in his diary: “Last Sabbath a week ago (Mch.18) I inaugurated the ceremony of the bat mitzvah at the S.A.J. Meeting House (41 W. 86th St.) . . . My daughter Judith was the first one to have her bat mitzvah celebrated there.”1 Mordecai Kaplan had no doubt that he had done something really new. To this day the ceremony bat mitzvah 107 for Judith Kaplan on March 18, 1922, is celebrated as the very first bat mitzvah . The event became famous because she herself became a well-known Jewish theologian, composer, and lyricist, Judith Kaplan Eisenstein. She often talked about her bat mitzvah, and when she died in 1996, obituaries described her as “the mother of the bat mitzvah.” Judith’s bat mitzvah took place when she was twelve and a half. Although invitations had been sent out in advance, the ceremony itself was devised in a hurry on Friday evening. The next day at the Shabbat morning ceremony , after the normal reading of the Torah and haftarah (reading from the Prophets) had been completed, Judith read part of the section Kedoshim (Lev. 19–20). She read from a printed book, not from a Torah scroll, but recited the traditional blessings before and after. The section was chosen by her father and was not the traditional reading for that week. It included the famous golden rule “Love your fellow as yourself.”2 Judith remembered the doubts expressed by her two grandmothers before the ceremony, each of whom tried to persuade the other to speak to Judith’s father about it.3 But her feminist friends turned out in force and thoroughly enjoyed the occasion. “It must be remembered that in 1922 our country was in the first flush of active feminism,” she explained later. “It was only two years after the adoption of the woman suffrage amendment .”4 Later in life she claimed that she had been encouraged by her father to question and challenge Orthodox views. “‘When I was 11, I told my father that I didn’t believe in God,’ she recalled . . . ‘There was a sense of freedom and freedom to change. There was a constant opening up of possibilities and enrichment’ with his view of Judaism, she said. ‘It made my being Jewish a great joy for me rather than a burden.’”5 When Mordecai Kaplan scribbled the note in his diary, he may well have meant that this was simply the first bat mitzvah in his new synagogue. But his words have been taken by many to mean that it was the first one in America or even the first one ever. Could this be correct? The answer depends on how you define a bat mitzvah. If it means a ceremony precisely corresponding to the traditional boy’s bar mitzvah, then Judith’s ceremony was not a bat mitzvah because it took place after the main service and because she read the Torah from a printed book instead of a handwritten scroll. If the term bat mitzvah can be used more loosely to describe a Jewish coming-of-age ceremony for girls, then the...

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