Fay Newman’s 11-year-old twins, Danielle and Jessica, just started attending the Bat Mitzvah Club in Cherry Hill, N.J. Part of a group of a dozen other girls their age, they meet twice a month on Sunday afternoons at Chabad Lubavitch of Camden County to discuss what it means to officially be approaching womanhood.
The girls receive journals and club kits as they prepare to embark on a school year’s worth of cooking, art projects, volunteer projects and learning together. Each child also gets an apron from Bat Mitzvah Clubs International, which connects some 500 chapters of the girl-focused pre-teen group in 30 countries. They’ll use them when they are elbow-deep in crafting and cooking.
This is Newman’s second time round with the program, she says, explaining that it was a positive experience for her now 15-year-old daughter, Hannah.
She says Chabad embraced Hannah, who has special needs, and welcomed her at all the activities. “She just loved it. They explain everything on different levels—you learn about Shabbat and growing to be a Jewish woman,” recounts Newman. “Hannah graduated from the club and had a bat mitzvah, and she wanted to light the candles every Friday night, so we did.”
Now that her younger daughters are the right age for the program, she says she wanted them to get involved. As far as the girls are concerned, having watched their sister go through it, they wanted to be a part of it, too.
In addition to the bat mitzvah preparation, the club works to instill self-confidence and teach the girls life lessons, notes Newman, who says she “wants them to come out feeling more part of the Jewish community and knowing what it means to be a Jewish woman.”
‘Just the Beginning’
Chabad-Lubavitch emissary Shterna Kaminker—who co-directs the Israeli Chabad Center in Voorhees, N.J., with her husband, Rabbi Menachem Kaminker—has coordinated the Bat Mitzvah Club for five years now, though it started about eight years ago at the Cherry Hill Chabad, which is co-directed by Rabbi Mendel and Dinie Mangel. She also runs the Beyond Bat Mitzvah Club, which is a year of continued learning. That group focuses on the Jewish woman, examining role models from biblical times onward, from the Jewish matriarchs through modern history and into the girls’ own families. Participants receive a scrapbook to chronicle their journeys.
The two programs, which run from after the High Holidays until late spring, attract some 20 girls annually between them. Girls tend to find out about the Bat Mitzvah Club by word of mouth, and attend before they’re 12, though it’s open to girls up until age 13.
“I try to impart to the girls the unique role of the Jewish woman in Judaism,” says Kaminker.
For the Bat Mitzvah Club, Kaminker explains that they start off focusing on the changes girls go through when becoming a bat mitzvah and what that signifies. They also talk through the practical aspects of preteen and teenage development, and seek to give the girls the confidence to make sound choices and do the right thing even when it’s not always comfortable or popular to do so. The girls also participate in mitzvah projects based on their interests, such as volunteering to pack food at a local pantry, sending care packages to Israeli soldiers and other ideas they offer.
“I hope that they approach their bat mitzvah and their celebration and everything about it in a more meaningful way, with more depth and understanding about what a bat mitzvah really is,” she says. “And that they realize this is just a little taste—that it’s just the beginning, and that they should continue learning and deepening their relationship with G‑d.”
‘Nice to Keep Learning’
Vadim Kligman’s daughter, Bella, joined the Bat Mitzvah Club in 2013-14 and came back the next year for the Beyond Bat Mitzvah program. He was involved with Chabad in the Soviet Union and sought it out locally when he moved with his family to Cherry Hill in 2005.
“She learned about being a Jewish girl and a Jewish woman,” says Kligman. “These are things neither me nor my wife could really give her because we grew up agnostic to a large degree. She spent time with Jewish girls her age and learned a lot about being a Jewish woman.”
He and his wife, Stella, say they were glad that their daughter could come home from the meetings with a deeper knowledge of her tradition. “This is something we find to be very important in our lives; this is one of the reasons we left the former Soviet Union,” he explains. “We certainly want our child to understand who she is and to value who she is, and we figured this was a good way to do it.”
Eden Lev, 12, was in the Bat Mitzvah Club last year, and this year will participate in the Beyond Bat Mitzvah Club. “It’s nice to keep learning about Judaism on Sundays because I don’t go to a Hebrew school or Jewish private school,” she says.
She recalls a great year in the Bat Mitzvah Club filled with projects and discoveries related to Judaism, including a particularly memorable one where they customized candles and lit them, observing how the flame still goes up even if the candle is turned upside-down. “Our neshamah [soul],” she reports, “always goes straight towards G‑d.”
While she doesn’t know what’s in store for the year ahead, she’s looking forward to being part of whatever is offered: “I’m excited because Shterna always has a cool new project every week.”
![A "getting to know you" game that the New Jersey girls played during the first meeting of the year.](https://w2.chabad.org/media/images/920/Gsgq9203692.jpg?_i=_n32DD4A5CE5B405756B86D11830CBE5B1 "A "getting to know you" game that the New Jersey girls played during the first meeting of the year.")
Esti Frimerman launched the Bat Mitzvah Club concept more than a decade ago. At that time, she was teaching sixth-grade girls in Brooklyn, N.Y., and thought they could get more out of their bat mitzvah birthdays.
In fact, she recalls, she had an “aha” moment: “I happened to stumble across some amazing Chassidic insight into what actually happens inside of a person when he or she becomes bar/bat mitzvah and turned that moment into building a select club just for girls on the growing-up journey—on the ‘coming of age’ bat mitzvah path.”
The concept took off and has since snowballed into clubs worldwide that are offered in French, German, Spanish, English and Portuguese, with Russian next. “The meaningfulness is what propelled the creation of this program and continues to propel it,” she says.
Frimerman notes that young girls acquire so much during the club year. “My goal was, and is, for girls to discover that there’s more to them than what they think, there’s more to them than what they see in the mirror, there’s more to them than what they know. There’s a G‑dly soul that is at their core that makes them who they are.”
For more information on the clubs, go to: www.batmitzvahclub.com.
Start a Discussion