The Bar Mitzva is one of the few religious ceremonies which every Jewish family will celebrate without fail. The problem is that except for studying the "Haftara" and donning tefillin on the day of the celebration, secular Jews don't relate in any way to the Jewish aspects of the event. Moreover, even the significance of "becoming a man" has become more of a symbolic issue than a real one.

A new project knows as "Project Bar Mitzva" attempts to effect some degree of change with regard to these two components, as one of the volunteers, Hannah Friedman, explains. "The idea was to find a project that would attract people in the first place; not the type of activity that that takes place in a closed room but rather something that goes out to the people and does something real and tangible. If you take a child who has grown up on a kibbutz, a new immigrant and some youth from one of the towns, and get them to sit together and discuss the same topic, a spirit of cooperation and mutual understanding develops among them. Thus the ground is laid for open discussion and joint activities

For the full story, contact Tova Dorfman

  December 1997