A bar or bat mitzvah experience must be built around deep study of the Torah, and positive Jewish experiences. And as for the child who is up to reading it — that’s great.

Click here to read more from Slate’s History Week. The “bash mitzvah,” as New York once dubbed it, is alive and unwell as a peculiarly American form of excess. As a teenager in the 1980s, I ...

Shoshana Gugenheim Kedem was the first woman commissioned to write a Torah scroll. With her son's bar mitzvah, ... And she had never read from the completed scroll until the bar mitzvah.

At his bar mitzvah, as soon as Gabe finishes reading from that Torah, he looks at his parents, smiles and noticeably exhales. For him, the toughest part is over. Soon the entire service concludes.

HIGHLAND PARK, Ill. (RNS) — Growing up in Argentina in an assimilated Jewish family, Jorge Singman never had a bar mitzvah, a rite of passage when Jewish teens read from the Torah scroll in ...

A bat mitzvah is based on the centuries-old ritual of bar mitzvah, or "son of the commandments," the ceremony for 13-year-old boys. Today, it typically involves months or years of study, chanting ...

O n the days my two sons were born, we began saving for their bar mitzvahs. In Jewish tradition, it’s customary for a 13-year-old to read from the Torah and then have a party to celebrate their ...

In less than a week, my son, George, will turn 13, and like generations of Jewish boys before him, he will become a bar mitzvah. Bar mitzvah translates literally to “son of the commandments.” ...

Bar and bat mitzvah literally translated as “son/daughter of commandment” refers to one who is responsible for observing the commandments of the Torah. When a child attains the age of bar/bat ...

In recent years, bar mitzvahs have been made up of two parts: a religious ceremony where the bar mitzvah boy is called to read the Torah at a synagogue and a secular after-party to celebrate with ...

HIGHLAND PARK, Ill. (RNS) — Growing up in Argentina in an assimilated Jewish family, Jorge Singman never had a bar mitzvah, a rite of passage when Jewish teens read from the Torah scroll in ...