At last, a formal link with God

For some women, it's never too late to study for a bat mitzvah

The gauzy canopy floats light as air above a dozen women in their 40s, 50s and 60s who draw close together. Looking up through the silky fabric of the chuppah, they seem as transparently eager as teenagers. Which is fitting, because they are rehearsing for their bat mitzvah, female equivalent of the bar mitzvah - both coming-of-age rituals that their fathers, husbands, sons and daughters have celebrated, but they haven't. Not yet.

When Dana Marks was growing up, there were no ceremonies to mark a girl's passage into adult Jewish life. "I think I felt relieved I didn't have to," says Marks, one of the women under the canopy. "I wasn't raised to consider that I would ever do something like that. But as I got older I began to think it wasn't fair."

The first bat mitzvah in North America took place in 1922, when Judith Kaplan Eisenstein was called to the front of her father's synagogue in New York to read a portion of the Torah during a Sabbath service. She was the daughter of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, whose teachings laid the foundation for the Reconstructionist movement, which integrates tradition with a progressive point of view. But decades passed, and it wasn't until the women's movement came along in the 1960s and '70s that bat mitzvahs became routine for girls.

The women beneath the chuppah are members of Congregation Darchei Noam, Toronto's only Reconstructionist synagogue, which has a temporary home on the bottom floor of the B'nai Brith building on Hove St., in North York. Their bat mitzvah took place yesterday, but since photography isn't permitted in the synagogue on the Sabbath, the Toronto Star visited the women for a rehearsal earlier in the week.

Reading Hebrew aloud from the parchment scrolls of the Torah, which exclude vowels, requires a challenging, chant-like delivery. "I'm about to screw up," one woman lamented as she prepared to read her portion.

Coincidentally, the readings for this time of year are from Exodus, which is rich in imagery of strong women. "Oh no, I have to go after her, and she's so good," said another. Their friends applauded when each finished her part.

This bat mitzvah has a special emotional weight because these are grown-ups, and they have histories. Anita Evans' mother is an Israeli who married her father, a British soldier, in Palestine. Born in Scarborough, she was raised without religion and says she sometimes feels like a chameleon or an outsider.

Evans knew almost nothing about Judaism growing up, but the 47-year-old real-estate agent recalls that she had a strong sense of Israel and has visited often. She once worked on a kibbutz, and it was there she met her Jewish husband, Stuart Kamenetsky, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Toronto-Mississauga. At her daughter Dana's bat mitzvah two years ago, she wondered: "Would I ever feel comfortable enough?"

At last week's rehearsal she struggled to deftly swing the prayer shawl over her shoulders for the first time and laughed at her awkwardness. "I play hockey, I don't do this," she said. And two days before the service she was still nervous. "But I'm glad I'm going through it because of my kids." Her son Jordan will be bar mitzvahed next month. "It gives me greater appreciation of what we expect of our children and what pressure it is for them."

Increasingly over the past 25 years, synagogues have offered adult bat mitzvah classes, so that every other year or so, a handful of women complete the course of study. While popular in the Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist movements, adult bat mitzvahs are still less common in Orthodox Judaism.

The women at Darchei Noam are a diverse group, some in jeans, some in desert boots, one in Ferragamo ribboned flats. Some in the group married Jewish men and converted to Judaism. Some were raised in secular Jewish households. And some, like Harriet Liebmann, were raised in Orthodox families. "I consider this unfinished business. It's something reserved for privileged boys," says Liebmann, 63, an artist who brought the group together to hand-stitch the silken canopy. "When I was a girl in the Fifties, we accepted a lot of stuff. As I grew older I realized how strange it was to have two sets of privileges and responsibilities."

Marks' story is representative of the group. The 51-year-old social worker was raised in Calgary in a non-Jewish milieu. Her family attended synagogue on holidays. "I grew up feeling very different. I was teased because I was Jewish. I didn't look like the kids around me." She became active in the women's movement, but still felt disconnected because of the group's anti-Israel perspective. After university she went to a kibbutz, where she worked and studied. There she met more like-minded women.

She and her husband, Lee Coplan, an economist, joined Darchei Noam when Coplan's oldest son was being bar mitzvahed. Their daughter, Eliana, will be bat mitzvahed later this year. "I wanted to be a part of her bat mitzvah and I didn't know enough to do that," she said. "I was turning 50 and I wanted something important for me." She has a tutor helping her with Hebrew and also studies with her daughter, whose readings are about four times longer than her mother's. "I hope I'm a role model, studying Hebrew and learning my portion."

And she loves it. "I feel very proud of myself that I can read Hebrew. I'm actually doing this." As she read her portion of the Torah, all were silent, and the rabbi, Tina Grimberg, said quietly, "It's beautiful." Grimberg grew up in the Soviet Union knowing very little about Judaism, and came to the United States when she was 16. The slight 43-year-old, who wears a hand-painted silk kippah that looks more like a fashionable pillbox hat than a traditional head covering, has never had a formal bat mitzvah ceremony either.

"This is a big deal," says Grimberg, who has a one-year-old son. "Some of these are women who have completed child rearing and now, at their various ages, are inspired. They look back and say, `I want what I could not have, that part of life was not available to me. I want my children to do it, but how can I help or demand of my children this year-long study and commitment when I have not?'"

One thing that separates teen bat mitzvahs from adult ones is the after-party, which for young people is often a lavish event at a hotel or restaurant with a DJ or band. (In New York, the Daily News recently reported on the multi-million-dollar bat mitzvah of a daughter of a defence contractor that featured entertainers 50 Cent, Steven Tyler and Kenny G.) These women will have friends over or will go out for a quiet dinner with their families. Marks says the after-party isn't the main event for her. "The bat mitzvah is my personal journey. Who I am as a Jew. Who God is to me. The process of learning and the ceremony itself is what's important."