Initiation Ritual “Bar Mitzvah”

Initiation Ritual

“Bar Mitzvah”

Michael Nachman

Dartmouth College

2018

General Information About Item:

  • Genre: Customary Lore
  • Language: English
  • Country of Origin: United States
  • Informant: Michael Nachman
  • Date Collected: 11/1/18

 

Informant Data: Michael Nachman is a 20 year old Sophomore at Dartmouth College. Nachman comes from a town close to Long Island called Port Washington, New York. He graduated as valedictorian of Paul D. Schreiber High School. Nachman has two younger brothers. One of Nachman’s brothers will be celebrating his bar mitzvah this coming June!

Contextual Data:

Social Context: I collected this folklore from Michael Nachman in Novack cafe at Dartmouth College. Michael and I are familiar with one another, as we shared dormitory floors throughout Freshman and Sophomore years. Nachman’s family are very steeped in the Jewish culture, and they regularly attend the community synagogue of Port Washington, where Nachman had his bar mitzvah!

Cultural Context: The Jewish culture revolves around a tight knit community. Jews have suffered discrimination and persecution for thousands of years, so inherently, they take comfort in the companionship of members of their community. Jews also like to keep their tradition and religion in a state of flourishing. Therefore, Bar Mitzvahs are a common celebration in the jewish culture as a way to unite the people while rejoicing in a child’s coming of age ceremony. This ritual is arguably  the quintessential ritual for the Jewish people, and this explains how it is so well preserved.

Item:    A bar mitzvah is a coming of age ceremony for Jewish people who are thirteen years old if they are a boy and twelve years old if they are girls. For girls, this event is called a “bat mitzvah”. During this ceremony, the boy or girl reads from the torah and it takes roughly an hour.  The reading is a difficult task, the boy must learn on his own and read his passage on his own. Next, he must pass a hebrew test. If he fails these tasks he will not pass his bar mitzvah.

 

Audio File: https://drive.google.com/file/d/110gxf7xdKZLu_4PGaJUHpm-2u8ciEaT-/view?usp=sharing

 

Transcript for Bar Mitzvah:

“So my bar mitzvah happened when I was thirteen years old. I remember being very nervous about it, um because when you’re twelve/thirteen big parties are scary and you have to learn an entire portion and my torah portion was the ten commandments which is pretty special, pretty interesting for me to be able to talk about that in the context of me and my bar mitzvah and um yeah, to be honest, I  don’t have too much of a memory of my bar mitzvah, its all kind of a flashbulb of a memory.”

 

Informant’s Comments:

  • I love the Jewish culture!
  • It is a very serious ceremony with a lot of importance to the Jewish community.

Collector’s Comments:

  • Michael doesn’t seem to recall much about his own bar mitzvah, but he knows a lot about the culture and seems to be very involved in judaism.

 

Collector’s Name and Information:

 

Khia Hollyer 18

 

Dartmouth College

Russian 13

Fall 2018

 

Tags/Keywords: Jewish, Bar Mitzvah, Party, tradition

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *