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By Root 600 0

male takes responsibility in the religious practices of a community. He now wraps tefillin on weekday mornings, is counted in a minyan, and can be called up on Saturday morning for Torah reading. In traditional Jewish life, as it was practiced in Poland before the war and as it still is in Antwerp and on Rue Pavee, all of these functions are a normal part of daily life. The bar mitzvah is the first time in which he is called up to read Torah — presumably the first of many times. But in assimilated communities since the war, the bar mitzvah, rather than being a beginning, is the singular moment, often the only time in his life that the bar mitzvah boy will go up and read in a synagogue. For this reason, assimilated Westerners have approached bar mitzvahs with ever greater fanfare. Central European communities, many of which had not seen a bar mitzvah in decades, saw bar mitzvahs as nothing less than a reaffirmation of the existence of Judaism.

Ninel was secretly afraid the entire thing would be an embarrassment. Did Mateusz really know how to read Hebrew? It was difficult for her to imagine Mateusz standing on a bimah reading in Hebrew. No one she had ever known in her family had ever done anything like that. But in fact Mateusz had learned Hebrew and gave a well-studied delivery to a synagogue filled with the people he had invited. Praying in a full synagogue stirred many memories for the few elderly survivors, and they wept. Mateusz's bar mitzvah—the first Poland had seen since the 1950s—received international press coverage. For months afterward, Ninel and Mateusz were interviewed on foreign television. A few years later, when she visited Israel, people recognized her on the streets from television interviews about her son's bar mitzvah. But her best memory from Israel was learning that Ninel is not only Lenin spelled backward but that in Hebrew Nin El means “great-granddaughter of God.”

“Finally,” she said, “the hunchback fell away.”

AMONG THE MANY foreign rabbis who arrived in Poland to help the struggling Polish Jews, none came as a greater shock than Emily Korzenik. She was a feminist-turned-rabbi in Stamford, Connecticut, where she particularly delighted in weddings and bar mitzvahs because they symbolized the continuation of Judaism. “A bar mitzvah,” she said, “is a celebration of the continuity of the Jewish people.”

Several members of her congregation were part of a tour of Poland and Israel. Such tours were a growing phenomenon. A group would be taken to Poland, where they would visit cemeteries and concentration camps, and then go on to Israel to see “Jewish life.” In Cracow they visited a Jewish canteen where the elderly remnant of a once-major community gathered for lunch. The canteen was run by a woman in her late seventies, the youngest person there. The group asked her if there was anything she needed from America, and she replied, “Bring us life.” She told the story of her nephew who had been taken away and killed by the Nazis while preparing for his bar mitzvah.

When Emily Korzenik heard this story, she decided that she would bring these people a bar mitzvah. Not that she would train a Cracow boy. Rather, she would choose among the boys in Connecticut whom she was preparing. She picked a handsome blond of Polish Jewish origin. Korzenik thought it would be a wonderful thing for the people of Cracow to have his bar mitzvah in their synagogue.

Two Cracow synagogues had been reopened after the war, and until 1968 they both offered daily services. The more famous was the Remuh, named after a sixteenth-century Talmudic scholar whose work is still regarded by the ultra-Orthodox as defining precepts for their way of life. Every year on the anniversary of his death, the Orthodox had made a pilgrimage to his nearby grave. When the regime would let them, ultra-Orthodox from New York took up the practice again. With the help of such visitors, the Remuh Synagogue was able to get a minyan,

The other Cracow synagogue was the Templum, which had been liberal. Before the war, there had been a reform movement in Polish