Wartime Celebrations Are a Mixed Blessing
So much excitement. The first bar mitzvah in a family of four boys, months of learning, accompanying Abba to shul during the week as well as Shabbat, proudly embracing your new status of Jewish manhood.
Some of your friends are already bar mitzvah and you’ve been to parties and outings, celebrating this milestone birthday with others. The more recent parties, however, have required close proximity to safe rooms or bomb shelters. Planning a simcha in Israel requires that this element gets added to all ‘To Do’ lists. You take it in stride because you have never been on a class trip without an armed-security guard. In Israel, that’s the way it is.
When my father, Poppie Stanley, was bar mitzvahed in 1937, his father stood beside him at the weathered bima, proudly pointing to the ancient words in his own open chumash (bible); his permanently stained fingers (from years of housepainting and furniture refinishing) followed each precious utterance of his first American-born son. Together they returned to the fifth-floor tenement walkup in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where neighbors made a l’chaim and dined on sponge-cake and a few bowls of walnuts-and-raisins. The Depression was in full bloom and the feast was considered elaborate.
Your great-grandfather (Saba Raba) Isachaar was bar mitzvahed on a Shabbat morning in Herut, Afghanistan. I can only intuit that the poverty his family endured was immeasurable.
Who were those bar mitzvah boys during the Spanish Inquisition, some of whom swore allegiance to a foreign religion rather than be murdered, while secretly trying to keep our mesorah (tradition) alive? A few of these conversos have found their way back to our collective bosom but the vast majority has disappeared.
Like me, you have heard the stories of Holocaust survivors who were never bar mitzvahed; death marches dwarfed simcha planning. Those who lived are counting on you, Aviel, to invest, soar, somehow making their unrequited sacrifices meaningful.
Having just come out of Pesach, we recall that not all of the Jews were redeemed from the jaws of Egypt. Only 20% left, the rest left to evaporate into the rank and file of forgotten nations. You are among this fragment which carries the torch of our ancestors; our blood courses with the song and spirit of Sinai when we received an eternal mandate, a mandate that you wear with both pride and defiance at this pivotal moment in Jewish history.
Eli Sharabi, author of the book Hostage, endured 491 days in Hamas captivity. His entire family was murdered and he suffered indescribable abuse. When asked about the comparison between the Holocaust and the October 7, 2023 massacre, he responded: “Don’t equate the two. During the Shoah, the victims were alone, desperate, awaiting inevitable death. There was no one to save them. No Jewish army, no Jewish state. They felt doomed.”
“While languishing in tunnels in Gaza, I did not know whether or not I’d be found alive but none of us doubted that we had a loving nation and a mighty military machine that would stop at nothing to bring us home.
“There is no comparison.”
You, my precious grandson, come from a long line of Jews who did not give up. We neither bowed-out or tossed off the yoke of Torah observance. By G-d’s grace, we arrived at this day with joy and humility, and watch you eagerly accept the responsibility of moral Jewish manhood with modesty, gratitude and a profound appreciation of our staggering, blessed history.
New York native Andrea Simantov has lived in Jerusalem since 1995. She writes for several publications, appears regularly on Israel National Radio and owns an image consulting firm for women.