Girls Celebrate Group Bat Mitzvah

By COLlive reporter
Photos by Peter Halmagyi

The Bat Mitzvah club of Centro Novo Horizonte, directed by Shlucha Pessy Gansburg, celebrated the completion of a year’s worth of meetings where the girls had exciting lessons on our mitzvot, customs, traditions, prayer, with a strong focus on the role a Jewish woman.

In Sao Paulo, Brazil, most girls who attend a Jewish school have a bat mitzvah with their class, but girls who do not attend Jewish schools are left out. The Bat Mitzvah club offers an opportunity for those girls who do not attend Jewish schools to come learn and then celebrate as well. The girls come from many different backgrounds, and for many it is their first contact with Judaism and the Jewish community.

In addition to classes and weekly events, the program is enriched with a winter camp, and a shabbaton with the Bat mitzvah club in Curitiba, challah baking classes, visits to the Woman’s mikvah, kosher supermarket, and Mother and Daughter get together, thus experiencing our traditions and the life of a Jewish woman. They made a circle of friends within the community.

Two of the girls were given Jewish names as they had not received one when they were born. By the end of this year we saw how they started to feel closer to our roots, and were feeling proud to be Jewish.

As one of the mothers said to Rabbi Noach and Pessy: “Thank you for making the learning not work, but a joy. For making us feel we are people of value. Thank you for removing the fear of things we did not understand, leading us finally to understand them. Thank you for helping us resolves things we thought were difficult to resolve. You are people worthy of our total trust and whom we can turn to when life gets difficult.”

The Bat Mitzvah club of Centro Novo Horizonte is a part of Bat Mitzvah Clubs International, based in New York.