Printer Friendly

Email to A Friend

Friday January 25, 2008

Turning 80? Time for your b’nai mitzvah

by joshua brandt
correspondent

When Rabbi Sheldon Marder honored the Jewish Home’s septuagenarian and octogenarian b’nai mitzvah last December, he noted that they had come a long way to achieve their dreams.

Indeed they had.

The celebrants came from an era when women were denied traditional rights of passages. They overcame profound spiritual doubts. And they came from far-flung places — specifically, Watertown, S.D. and the People’s Republic of Congo — where the term “Jewish life” was practically an oxymoron.

When asked how many other Jewish families lived in his hometown of Watertown, Earl Annecston responded with the brevity and clarity befitting a man who grew up on an Indian reservation in the Great Plains.

“I don’t have the slightest idea,” said the 82-year-old longtime volunteer.

Annecston, who has been volunteering “off the books” at the Jewish Home since 1948, celebrated his bar mitzvah with four people who became close friends during the yearlong odyssey usually undertaken by Jewish teenagers. So Annecston could relate to Rabbi Marder’s assertion that “to become a b’nai mitzvah as an elder is to make a profound commitment.”

For many of the b’nai mitzvah, the profound commitment began by grappling with Hebrew.

“If you want to learn how difficult it is to speak Hebrew, try learning Chinese,” Annecston said. “If I tried to read Hebrew during the ceremony, everyone would still be sitting there.”

Like many of the other celebrants, Annecston was turned off the traditional path of Judaism. His rabbi was an “old-time knuckle-rapper” who left a lot of scars in his wake. In addition, Jewish boys of a certain age didn’t study Hebrew in Watertown.

“When the boys in our family tree got old enough, they went and opened a general store,” Annecston said.

Rebekah Finer, 77, also grew up in an environment that wasn’t conducive to a Jewish education, although in her case, it was strictly a matter of gender.

Finer, who took a streetcar to Hebrew school in Omaha, Neb., had a love of Judaism instilled in her by her father, who was a cantor. Finer had a passion for learning and was fluent in Hebrew. But that wasn’t good enough for her local rabbi.

“I told my rabbi that I could read the Torah as well as any of the boys, and he told me, ‘I know you can, but you still can’t get bat mitzvahed.’”

Although Finer faced a significant hurdle in getting her bat mitzvah, she was not deterred from pursuing other educational goals: She graduated with a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies from Brandeis University.

Like many of the other participants in the ceremony, Finer said that she was extremely nervous prior to the event, and that the butterflies resulted in more than a few sleepless nights.

Francine Hament, who recently celebrated the “42nd anniversary of her 39th birthday,” prefaced a question about what the bat mitzvah meant to her by asking if she could favor her listener with song. Lifting and twisting “As Time Goes By,” Hament sang, “A bris is still a bris/ A chai is still a chai/ And pastrami still belongs on rye . . .”

Hament, an artist, dancer and singer, espouses the belief that “if you live in the moment, there’s no end to the great stuff.”

Her primary motivation for getting her bat mitzvah in the “autumn of her summer years” was her son, Gary. Although Gary had some learning difficulties, he studied Torah assiduously and got his bar mitzvah in a ceremony that, as she recalls, “didn’t leave a dry eye in the house.”

She also credits the Home for smoothing the path to her bat mitzvah. “The atmosphere at the Jewish Home is wonderful,” she said. “At times I sound like a PR person for them, but I couldn’t imagine a more supportive environment.”

A relative youngster of 69, Rachel Alhadeff can be forgiven for struggling with Hebrew. After all, her native tongue is Swahili.

“Oh, I’ve forgotten most of my Swahili now,” said Alhadeff. “I really don’t have anyone to speak it with.”

Alhadeff was born in the People’s Republic of Congo, where she not only grew up speaking Swahili, but was raised in an Orthodox family while attending Catholic school. Alhadeff moved to the United States in 1946, and came to the Bay Area to be with her ailing mother.

When her mother became ill, Alhadeff asked if she needed a roommate. “I told her ‘You took care of me, and now it’s my turn to repay the favor.’”

In large part, Alhadeff, who studied more than five hours a day for the better part of year for her bat mitzvah, undertook the journey to honor her parents, who remained in the Congo to escape Nazi persecution.

Geography and cultural traditions were less of an issue for Frances Marder, whose son is rabbi at the Jewish Home.

Marder overcame several profound tests of faith, including the death of her sister at 21, leaving Marder an only child with emotionally devastated parents. Marder also had several serious physical ailments that shook her beliefs.

Ironically, it wasn’t making aliyah — she eventually worked as an assistant to Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek — that brought her closer to her Jewish faith — it was a trip to Yosemite in 1980. “It’s really not hard to be Jewish in Israel,” she said.

Upon gazing at the rugged beauty of Yosemite, however, Marder experienced a spiritual awakening. “Only God could make something of such majesty,” she said.

“At the same time,” she continued, ”only an all-knowing God could have devised something as complex and wonderful as the human body.”

Did you find this article interesting? Subscribe to our FREE newsletter and you'll be notified each week when "J." goes online. We'll tell you about the most important stories of the week and give you a link to each one.

This page contains a BETA version of Amazon contextual links. They are marked by the dashed underline.  Your purchases support our site. At times they point to items which are not related to the actual link. Please alert us by email if you discover objectionable links.