A century ago this month, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan—a Russian-born American Jewish thinker who founded the Reconstructionist movement—held a bat mitzvah for his daughter Judith. Menachem Wecker revisits the event, and the history of the ritual in America:
That bat mitzvah came to be seen as the first public celebration of its sort in the United States.
European Jews were already celebrating bat mitzvahs, and the Reform Jewish movement had done away with bar mitzvahs for thirteen-year-old boys in the 19th century, opting instead for co-ed communal confirmations. The real story, to [the eminent historian Jonathan] Sarna, is that bat mitzvahs began proliferating after World War II, when Conservative—rather than Reconstructionist—leaders saw it as a way to energize Jews who were moving from urban Jewish enclaves to the suburbs, where they lived alongside Gentiles. Bat mitzvah was part of the rabbinic arsenal for keeping newly trick-or-treating Jews in the fold.
Judith Kaplan’s bat mitzvah 100 years ago was quite different from today’s ceremonies. Her father chanted from the Torah scroll, after which Judith did so from a book. She did not stand at the central bimah podium. “No thunder sounded no lightning struck,” she wrote later. “The institution of Bat Mitzvah had been born without incident.” She added that both of her grandmothers sought to persuade her father not to hold the ceremony, which was much more important to the father of the bat mitzvah than it was to Judith.
Read more on Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/03/01/how-coming-of-age-ritual-jewish-girls-aided-rise-womens-rights/