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.

JERUSALEM (RNS) Bar mitzvah boys are encouraged to read from the Torah at the Western Wall, but the state-supported Western Wall Heritage Foundation, which is run by Israel’s Orthodox ...

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.” ...

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 ...

The Arab press in Israel has begun a campaign of incitement against the increase in the Torah as part of the bar – mitzvah many years held at the Western Wall, according to several Haredi ...

This April, Lexi Rosenbloom will celebrate her bat mitzvah in front of more than a hundred friends and family members. Like most Jewish 12- or 13-year-olds, she will be called to read from the ...

NEW YORK (AP) The young boy read from the Torah during his bar mitzvah, his guests enjoyed a catered kosher spread and the proud father returned to his cell. The party for the son of a convicted ...

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 ...