Existing comment:
Coming of Age
Religious communities have long played a role in defining the transition from girlhood to womanhood with rites of passage. Yet, girls take on these traditions and remake them in different ways.
Bat Mitzvah
In the synagogue, a 13-year-old boy becomes a man at his bar mitzvah. But no comparable ceremony sanctified girls' coming of age until 1922, when a New York rabbi invented bat mitzvah for his daughter.
By the late 1900s, Jewish girls had claimed the millenia-old ritual known as the bar mitzvah for themselves. |