Judith Kaplan Eisenstein
March 18, 2022 is the 100th anniversary of the first publicly celebrated Bat Mitzvah in the U.S. A Bat Mitzvah ceremony for Judith Kaplan, aged 12, daughter of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, took place at her father’s synagogue, The Society for the Advancement of Judaism (SAJ) in New York City.
Judith Kaplan was born in 1909, the eldest of four daughters born to Lena (Rubin) and Rabbi Mordecai Menachem Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism. Judith was noted to be intellectually precocious and musically gifted.
She learned to read English at age two and a half and began studying Hebrew at age three. At age seven, she studied at the Institute of Musical Art, now the Juilliard School, in New York. She attended the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) Teachers Institute and Columbia University’s Teachers College, where she received her B.S. (1928) and M.A. (1932) in music education. She later earned a PhD in the School of Sacred Music at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR).
A brief marriage to Albert Addelston ended in divorce. In 1934, she married Ira Eisenstein, then assistant rabbi at her father’s synagogue, who became Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s successor in leading the Reconstructionist movement. They had two daughters, Miriam Rachel Eisenstein, a lawyer with the U.S. Justice Department, and Ann Nehama Eisenstein, a therapist in private practice in New York.
Kaplan Eisenstein taught music pedagogy and the history of Jewish music at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College for many years. She also created the first Jewish songbook for children, Gateway to Jewish Song (1937). Her other published works include Festival Songs (1943) and Heritage of Music: The Music of the Jewish People (1972). In 1987, she created and broadcasted a 13-hour radio series on the history of Jewish music.
Judith Kaplan Eisenstein shares her impressions of her bat mitzvah experience in 1922 in this excerpt from The Book of the Jewish Life (UAHC Press):
“At the time of my 12th birthday, the age at which Jewish law recognizes a girl as a woman, subject to the mitzvot, “commandments,” there had been no synagogue where such a ceremony could be conducted.
It would be less than the whole truth to say that I was as full of enthusiasm about the subject of the ceremony as my father was. I was worried about the attitude of my own peers, the early teenagers who even then could be remarkably cruel and disapprove of the “exception,” the person who does not conform to the normal practice.
On the morning of my Bat Mitzvah, we all went together–father, mother, disapproving grandmothers, my three little sisters, and I–to the brownstone building on 86th Street [in New York City] where the Society for the Advancement of Judaism carried out all its functions.
Women’s rights or no women’s rights, the old habit of separating the sexes at worship died hard. The first part of my own ordeal was to sit in that front room among the men, away from the cozy protection of mother and sisters.
The service proceeded as usual, through Shacharit, the morning service, and through the reading. Father was called up for the honor of reading the maftir, the last section of the Torah reading.
When we finished the haftarah, a reading from the Prophets, I was signaled to step forward to a place below the bimah at a very respectable distance from the scroll of the Torah, which had already been rolled up and garbed in its mantle. I pronounced the first blessing, and from my own Chumash, the Five Books of Moses, read the selection that my father had chosen for me, continued with the reading of the English translation, and concluded with the closing berakhah, ‘blessing.’
That was it. The scroll was returned to the ark with song and procession, and the service resumed.No thunder sounded, and no lightning struck. The institution of bat mitzvah had been born without incident, and the rest of the day was all rejoicing.”
While Judith’s bat mitzvah ceremony heralded an unprecedented level of gender parity in Jewish religious life and proved epically symbolic, it was not equivalent to bar mitzvah. In 1992, at age 82, she celebrated a second Bat Mitzvah, surrounded by leaders of the modern Jewish feminist movement. In contrast to her first Bat Mitzvah, this time, she read from a Torah scroll. Judith Kaplan Eisenstein died on February 14, 1996.
History of the Bat Mitzvah
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Bat Mitzvah, it is notable to review its history.
Pre-history of the Bat Mitzvah Ceremony before 1922
Related rituals already were occurring in traditional Jewish communities outside the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In Italy, girls in Turin and Milan dressed in white and wore flower wreaths on their heads, celebrating their religious maturity at age 12 at special gatherings held at the synagogue on weekdays. They took turns reciting prayers before the ark in the presence of the chief rabbi. Italian Jews imported this custom to Alexandria and Tunis in the 1930s.
In France, it was customary to make a seudet mitzvah (festive meal) for both boys and girls coming of age, although this may have been a confirmation celebration rather than a Bat Mitzvah celebration. In Bagdad, girls marked their twelfth birthdays weaking festive clothing to synagogue and reciting the Schhecheyanu. In Lemberg, Austria (now Lviv, Ukraine), a rabbi had some sort of a celebration for girls at his Reform temple in 1902, which was protested outside the temple by Zionists.
In the 19th century in the U.S. some congregations celebrated 12 year old girls coming of religious age, but these appeared to be group confirmation ceremonies usually on Shavuot, not individual Bat Mitzvah ceremonies.
The earliest Bat Mitzvah in which a girl actually read from the Torah herself might have been Ida Blum in Calumet, Michigan around 1920. Though not otherwise documented, she recalls being tutored by her father and reading a section from the Torah scroll around her 12th birthday, without a formal celebration of the event.
Adoption of the Bat Mitzvah by Progressive Jewish Congregations
Over the next two decades, progressive congregations were slow to implement a Bat Mitzvah ceremony. Among Reform congregations, confirmation remained the coming-of-age ceremony of choice for both boys and girls, even replacing Bar Mitzvah for boys in some of the more radical Reform temples. Ten years after Judith Kaplan’s Bat Mitzvah ceremony, the majority of Conservative rabbis still didn’t know what it was. But given Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s standing as a Professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Bat Mitzvah slowly began to make inroads within the Conservative movement.
In 1932, Rabbi Morris Silverman submitted a report in the “Survey of Ritual” to the Rabbinical Assembly convention explaining that the Bat Mitzvah is an individual ceremony for the girl, separate from a confirmation ceremony, corresponding to the Bar Mitzvah ceremony of the boy. After a year of training a study of Hebrew, a girl reaching the age of 12 or 13 is called up to the pulpit after the Haftara, reads the prayer “May pleasant we therefore beseech Thee” in Hebrew and English, reads a portion of the Torah in Hebrew and English, and may follow with a brief original speech written by the Bat Mitzvah herself. She then is welcomed by the Rabbi, given a certificate of Bat Mitzvah and receives a benediction from the Rabbi.
By the time of the “Survey of Ritual” report in 1948, about half of Conservative synagogues offered a Bat Mitzvah, although only a small number of families chose to participate. In 1962, a survey showed that nearly all Conservative synagogues conducted individual or group Bat Mitzvah ceremonies, most on Friday nights or weekdays/weeknights. The Bat Mitzvah grew to be very popular as part of the 1970s second wave feminist movement, becoming ubiquitous in both Conservative and Reform congregations. Until 1955, the Bat Mitzvah girl in Conservative congregations typically read the Haftarah on Friday night. This was done because women were not allowed to have Aliyot in Conservative synagogues until 1955 responsum from The Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Conservative movement. By 1995, all Conservative synagogues held Shabbat morning Bat Mitzvah ceremonies
Bat Mitzvah in Orthodox Congregations
The visibility of the Bat Mitzvah among Conservative congregations prodded Orthodox rabbis to consider instituting it as well. In 1944, Rabbi Jerome Tov Feinstein held a Friday night Bat Mitzvah ceremony at Anshe Emes in Brooklyn, consisting of the girl lighting candles and answering questions about what she had learned.
However, the Bat Mitzvah was the subject of restraints and opposition in the Orthodox world with a variety of responsa from legal scholars:
1. Some absolutely opposed any form of a public Bat Mitzvah celebration or party, claiming that it was an innovation of progressive Jewish movements, outside the boundaries of tradition.
2. Some allowed a celebration with restrictions, at home, marking the occasion in the synagogue (but not at the Bimah) without a festive Kiddush celebration, or allowed a celebration in the girl’s school.
3. The most lenient believed that celebration of girl’s education was a positive achievement, but many thought it should be done at home with some words of Torah.
In the 1980s, some Orthodox women held a separate women’s Tefillot, including reading the Torah and Haftarah. Girls began to have a Bat Mitzvah in these separate women’s services, reading the Torah portion, Haftarah, and giving a Dvar Torah. Modern Orthodox women and congregations continued to develop other alternatives, such as the Bat Mitzvah girl doing a Siyyum of a tractate of Talmud or reading the book of Esther on Purim or Shir Hashirim on Pesach.
Also in the 1980s modern and liberal Orthodox synagogues held a Bat Chochmah ceremony instead of Bat Mitzvah. It could be held at any time, but if it was on Shabbat morning, it occurred after the service. Men and women sat together to indicate that it was not an official service. The girl stood on the Bimah and gave a Dvar Torah not related to the weekly portion.
In 1993 Chabad created Bat Mitzvah Clubs to empower girls “to become a strong, smart, spiritual individual who understands there’s more to a Bat Mitzvah than a party.”
Impact of the Bat Mitzvah
The popularity and acceptance of the Bat Mitzvah chiseled away at the gender divide in Judaism and was an impetus to other changes, including promotion of equality in Jewish worship, rituals, and leadership. Bat Mitzvah girls and the women who followed them as Bat Mitzvah adults have expanded the parameters not only of who gets to learn Jewish but who gets to do Jewish.