The year was 1960. The place was Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Fraternal twins, a
boy and girl are being raised in an ultra-Orthodox home. She is older by 12
minutes, and it’s an issue between them, since he liked being a bully—and
she would yell, “I’m 12 minutes older than you are, have a little respect!”
As young children, born on Simchat Torah, one of the liveliest and happiest
Jewish holidays, they would share the fun in shul—dancing with their father
around the bimah, sneaking along the floor during the Amida, bothering the
men, tying their shoelaces together, helping the older boys wrap the baal
tefillah in his talit and carry him out of the building—people did wild things on
Simchat Torah in Crown Heights—they even drank a lot and danced in the
streets.

But then the little girl turned nine, and was told, “OUT! You are a girl. You don’t belong here.” And Simchat Torah was never the same. I ought to know. That little girl was me.

We were born to Eastern European Holocaust survivors and were the first set of twins delivered after the war in Williamsburgh, but when we moved, were not the only twins on Crown Street. An older set of American Jewish twins lived right
next door. And on Shabbat afternoons, I would go visiting and once noticed an
interesting black and white photo album, with a fancy light blue cover embossed
with the names of my neighbors. In it were photos that pre-dated Bar Mitzvah Disco. She and her brother were all decked out, he in his talit and big white kippah, she in a pretty party dress, looking as if they were sharing equally in the goodies and ceremonies surrounding his bar mitzvah and her thirteenth birthday. Knowing what I know now, the family must have been Conservative and she was one of those pioneering bat mitzvah girls, albeit at 13. It obviously registered with me, a student at the local Beth Jacob School, hardly a bastion of modernity or feminism.

When my 12th birthday rolled around I asked my parents about a bat mitzvah, and was given the fish eye. I was allowed to have a couple of girl friends over while shul hopping, and they gave me a 7” birthday cake in the darkened Sukkah. Big whoop. By then, my twin brother was already being prepped for his big day. He had to learn how to read melodically from the Torah scroll, sing his Haftorah, deliver a Talmudic discourse, and besides making Kiddush, he was going to get Chatan Bereishit for his aliyah, which was big stuff. He also made a speech in shul, and then at lunch afterward, which was held in the gym at Crown Heights Yeshiva, two blocks down from the Agudath Israel, where my father was the shul president.

I was told to stay out of the way, while in addition to all that attention,
he walked away with the honors on Friday night and Saturday night, too, at
the Melaveh Malke. It was all about him. What was I? Chopped liver? Nope.
Getting cut out of the fun on Simchat Torah was the first offense. Now they were
cutting me out of this fun too? Hey, where was my bat mitzvah? If the girl
next door could share her brother’s bar mitzvah, so could I.
Well, there was no way they would let me make a speech in shul or at the
dinner tables on Shabbat. But there was one more event planned—a big party for
my parents’ friends and business associates, their fellow Holocaust survivors
from around the world, who all came to share in the Sunday evening event at
the Riverside Plaza Hotel on Manhattan’s West Side, right off big, bright
Broadway. It was going to be the biggest moment of them all because here my
brother was going to make his speech in English, and he was going to have a head
table with all his friends, and it wasn’t about shul or ritual or rabbis, and I could demand and get what I wanted.

At first my parents fought me tooth and nail. But I prevailed. Was I
thrilled? No. My mother put me into this custom-made pink confection that made me look like a giant wad of bubblegum, but at least she let the orthodontist remove my braces. My hair looked like Kinky Friedman’s (no relation) on a bad hair day, and my zits were absolutely embarrassing. But I had my head table, surrounded by my friends, and got up there and made my speech about beginnings, and even got a couple of fountain pens and checks of my own.

That was in 1960, when we were considered first generation Haredim. The entertainer my father hired for us wasn’t Beyonce, Madonna or 50 Cent. The star of the evening was the one and the only Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, at the very beginning of his career. Though he didn’t like being introduced by a Satmar Hasid as the Jewish Elvis, he got up in front of the mike, strummed his guitar, sang about our souls and blew us all away.

(A version of this article first appeared in the Jewish Standard’s bar/bat mitzvah
supplement in 2005)