At 10:30 this Saturday morning, four Wesleyan students will come of age in the Jewish faith. Lynn Cartwright-Punnett ’07, Gabrielle Fondiller ’07, Meredith Katz ’07, and Zach Strassburger ’06 will symbolically join the Jewish community in a ceremony called a Bar/Bat Mitzvah; “Bar” denotes male and “Bat” denotes female. The words in Hebrew mean, “child of God/Commandments.”
This tradition stems from the Jewish practice of having different members of the religious congregation read from the Torah, the first five books of the holy Jewish text, each Saturday morning. A person becomes B’nai Mitzvah when they read the Torah for the first time to the congregation. This represents becoming a Jewish adult, and in many sects of Judaism, it is the beginning of an adolescent’s study of the Torah.
Usually a person has a Bar/Bat Mitzvah around the time of their thirteenth birthday. It is becoming more common nowadays, however, for people to become B’nai Mitzvot at a later age, as Cartwright-Punnett, Fondiller, Katz, and Strassburger have chosen to do.
“Each of us decided to do this for different reasons,” Katz said.
“I didn’t have a Bat Mitzvah when I was 13 and I always half expected to have one later,” Carwright-Punnett said, “and then I got an email from Daniel Heller about the possibility of this happening and I decided it was time.”
Daniel Heller ’06 organized the event as a special project for his Jewish Renaissance Fellowship group.
“I wanted to do something that would touch people personally,” Heller said. “One great thing about these B’nai Mitzvot is that while some colleges have mock weddings, this is a ceremony that is totally real.”
Heller, with Rabbi David Leipziger and a large number of students from the Jewish community, has helped to organize the event from planning the party to tutoring the soon-to-be B’nai Mitzvot. Over the past semester, the four students met every Friday with different student teachers or the rabbi to discuss different aspects of Judaism from theology to matzo ball soup.
In addition to these group sessions, each student was tutored individually on a weekly basis by other students from the Jewish community to learn how to read Hebrew, specifically their sections in the Torah and the prayers traditionally read before and after the reading.
“It’s pretty awesome,” Cartwright-Punnett said. “[Becoming a Bat Mitzvah] gives you a good sense of accomplishment. I used to feel like most Jews have a background [in their religion] while I had been fudging my way, but now I feel more like a member of the community.”
The B’nai Mitzvot have written short speeches they will read after their Torah portions, called D’var Torahs. This gives them a chance to explain why they chose to become Bar/Bat Mitzvah, and what the passage they chose to read from the Torah means to them.
This will be the first time that any Wesleyan student has become Bar/Bat Mitzvah on campus. But it is certainly not the last year that the Wesleyan Jewish community will offer such an opportunity. The service will take place tomorrow, May 1, at 10:30 a.m in the Butterfield C lounge. The entire campus has been invited to both the service as well as the party that will follow tomorrow evening in the Alumni Gym from 10p.m-2a.m. Daniel Heller admits that he called up a West Hartford synagogue and asked them for the number of their best Bar Mitzvah DJ, and that’s who is coming for this party. Cartwright-Punnett insisted that everybody also know that the party will have a really great moon-bounce.
A few frosh who have been selected for the Jewish Renaissance Fellowship next year are planning on continuing the program and improving it from what they have learned this year. One of these changes may be to invite everybody to the Friday evening classes on Judaism, not just the B’nai Mitzvot students.
For tomorrow, Mazel Tov to Lynn, Meredith, Zach and Gabrielle on their wonderful accomplishment!
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