Women
- First American Bat Mitzvah (March 18, 1922)
On Saturday morning, March
18, 1922, twelve-year old Judith Kaplan, the daughter of Rabbi Mordecai
M. Kaplan, stepped to the bimah of her father’s synagogue, the Society
for the Advancement of Judaism. She recited the preliminary blessing,
read a portion of the Torah sidra in Hebrew and English and then intoned
the closing blessing. "That was enough to shock a lot of people," she
later recalled, "including my own grandparents and aunts and uncles."
The shocking event they had just witnessed, according to historian Paula
Hyman, was the first bat mitzvah conducted in the United States.
Reflecting on her historic moment, Kaplan observed, "No thunder sounded.
No lightning struck." Rather, Judith Kaplan and her father, founder of
Reconstructionist Judaism, set the model for what has now become a
widespread American Jewish practice.
As Hyman notes, "The bat mitzvah ritual was introduced into American
Judaism as both an ethical and pragmatic response to gender divisions in
traditional Judaism." In Jewish law, a girl reaches majority at age 12,
but until the invention of bat mitzvah there was no ritual ceremony to
mark this passage. Mordecai Kaplan intended bat mitzvah to give females
equal standing with males and stimulate Jewish education for women so
they would be better able to transmit Jewish knowledge to their
children.
While it started with Reconstructionism, Hyman attributes the further
evolution of bat mitzvah to the American Conservative movement. In the
mid-19th century, American Reform began moving away from traditional
ceremonies such as male bar mitzvah. Instead, Reform congregations
introduced group confirmation ceremonies when the boys and girls in
their religious schools completed their education, around age 15.
Confirmation, then, was more of a graduation ceremony than a bar
mitzvah. Traditional Orthodoxy did not allow women to read the Torah.
Thus, if girls of 12 or 13 were to have a coming-of-age ceremony
equivalent to bar mitzvah for boys, it fell to the Conservative Movement
to define what that ceremony should be.
Change came gradually. As late as the 1930’s, despite Judith Kaplan’s
pathbreaking example, only a handful of Conservative synagogues had
adopted bat mitzvah. By 1948, however, one-third of Conservative
congregations conducted them and, by the 1960s, the ceremony became the
norm within Conservatism.
The earliest American bat mitzvot were, ritually, not quite the same as
bar mitzvot. They were usually held on Friday nights, when the Torah is
not read or, if held on Saturday morning like Judith Kaplan’s, the bat
mitzvah girl would read from a printed humash, or book containing the
Bible, rather than from the Torah scroll itself.
The first recorded bat mitzvah at a Reform congregation occurred in 1931
but, as with the Conservative movement, the ritual did not catch on
right away. By the 1950’s, only one third of Reform congregations
conducted them. Since the 1960s, as Reform has placed increasing
emphasis on traditional rituals, bat mitzvah has grown to near
universality in that movement’s congregations. A number of modern
Orthodox congregations have now adopted some form of bat mitzvah as
well. Bat mitzvah, an innovation in 1922, is now an American Jewish
institution.
The introduction of bat mitzvah, which was originally meant only to mark
the passage from Jewish girlhood to Jewish womanhood, raised a series of
issues. As Paula Hyman puts it, "How could a girl be called to Torah as
a bat mitzvah and then never have such an honor again?" Both Reform and
Conservativism grappled with this problem and, by the 1970’s, a majority
of congregations in both movements called women to the Torah.
If no thunder sounded when 12-year old Judith Kaplan read at the bimah
of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, Kaplan herself went on to
make a joyful noise of her own. A brilliant child who learned to read
English at age 2 and Hebrew at age 3, she studied at what is now the
Juilliard School of Music from ages 7 to 18. She received her B.A.
(1928) and M.A. (1932) in music education from Columbia University
Teachers College. In 1934, Kaplan married Ira Eisenstein, then assistant
rabbi in her father’s synagogue.
As Judith Eisenstein, she began a distinguished career as a teacher of
musical pedagogy and the history of Jewish music at the Jewish
Theological Seminary of America’s Teachers Institute. In 1959, at age
50, Eisenstein entered the School of Sacred Music of Hebrew Union
College, obtained her Ph.D. and remained as a member of the faculty
until 1979. By the time of her death in 1996, she had composed a
significant body of original liturgical music, created and broadcast a
thirteen-hour radio series on the history of Jewish music and authored a
number of books, including the first American Jewish songbook for
children (1937).
Of course, her monumental "first" remains her own bat mitzvah.
From:
http://www.ajhs.org/
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