A Celebration of Life for Holocaust Survivor

Hilda Kalir grew up in Germany and left in 1939, not long after Kristallnacht, “the night of broken glass” that marked the beginning of Adolf Hitler’s reign of terror against the Jews.

Like scores of Jewish women around her, Kalir, 83, missed out on raising a family and growing old with her husband in her hometown of Hamborn on the Rhine River.

Within minutes of the start of World War II, she and her husband fled to Jerusalem, where she later gave birth to their only child.

Thus, it is her daughter with whom Kalir shared some “wonderful . . . indescribable” history Saturday in a special religious ceremony at Temple Beth El.

Kalir and Shula Kalir-Merton, her 54-year-old daughter and the cantor at the temple here, shared a bat mitzvah, which, nowadays, Jewish girls commonly experience at 13.

In Kalir’s words, it was “out of this world! At my age, it was unbelievable. But I have to confess, I was a little bit nervous, having to read and sing all that Hebrew.”

The occasion was also a long time in coming.

Instead of feeling anger and searing regret, Kalir is a woman who long ago decided to grab life and hold on. From Israel, she moved to Sweden, then to Orange County, and all along, she said, survival and passion have been her lasting pursuits.

Her zest for life is evident in her remarkably unwrinkled face, in her lilting soprano that graces the choir of Heritage Pointe, the Jewish retirement home in Mission Viejo where she lives, and in her dozens of vivid wall paintings.

In recent years, she even has taken up interpretive dance.

She feels “deeply” blessed, she said, extending thank yous every night to her benevolent, loving God and believing that it’s never, ever too late to try something new. To live life any other way, she says, is just foolish, an invitation to mishegoss.

“You know,” she said with a scowl. “Craziness.”

*

So with daughter’s arm locked in mother’s and both sharing songs and prayers in Hebrew, the two women chose to celebrate their heritage together Saturday morning and, for a few moments, therein symbolized a growing trend.

Until recently, the bat mitzvah was nowhere near as common as the bar mitzvah, which Jewish males experience at age 13 and have for centuries. Even now, the bat mitzvah is acknowledged only in Conservative and Reform congregations.

Orthodox Jews do not allow female rabbis or cantors. In Orthodox congregations, men and women also sit separately, with only men conducting the service.

Orthodox rabbis say women hold a treasured place in the congregation. It’s just that leading the service in a rite of passage is something they traditionally reserve for males.

But on Saturday, Kalir and her daughter read from the Torah and the Haphtara, which together comprise most of the Christian Old Testament. Kalir also got a bonus, as many of the 500 families of Temple Beth El--the same synagogue where her daughter’s Streisand-like voice has filled the room on Friday nights and Saturday mornings since 1987--looked on admiringly.

As her daughter noted, a rarely known fact of Jewish tradition is the right to have a second bar or bat mitzvah at age 83, which Kalir also celebrated on Saturday.

“Kind of a two-in-one,” her daughter said.

It was Kalir-Merton’s idea that she and her mother share the bat mitzvah, with the daughter realizing her mother had a double opportunity few Jewish women of her generation have ever experienced.

The theory behind the second bat mitzvah at 83 is, Kalir-Merton said, the recognition “that 70 is pretty much the age allocated to people. In other words, it’s the age we have the right to expect from God. Anything beyond that is a gift.”

Despite being a cantor for almost a decade and a teacher of Jewish studies even longer, Kalir-Merton had never celebrated her own bat mitzvah.

“Like many Jewish girls,” she said, “I became a regularly counted member of the [Jewish] community at age 13, but I hadn’t had a ceremony and hadn’t gone up to [read] the Torah, and I thought, ‘What a memorable event for us to do together. We’ll remember it for a lifetime.’ ”

Rabbi Allen Krause, who presides over the 15-year-old Reform congregation at Temple Beth El, said bat and even bar mitzvahs are increasingly common for middle-aged to elderly Jews, although more so for women.

“We usually have 20 to 25 people who go through a [preparation] class,” he said, “and it’s tremendously emotional for people who haven’t done it before.”

One local rabbi, Hungarian-born Hiam Asa of Fullerton, went through his own bar mitzvah as an adult just a few years ago, Krause said.

For Kalir and her daughter, “It’s a statement,” Krause said, “just as it is for a 13-year-old--that they’re capable of conducting a normal Shabbos service all by themselves.”

For Kalir-Merton, it was also the deepening of a bond with her mother, “and a way to say thank you to our heritage, which has been the source of so much support and pride and which has allowed us to belong to the most extraordinary people.”

But for Kalir, the specialness also came in remembering both the good times and the bad, the people she lost as well as those she spent a lifetime with, the common bond being their love for and practice of Judaism.

“I am so very thankful,” she said, her face framed by her paintings of a Yemenite bride and Hasidic men gesturing wildly in conversation. “For a long time each night, I look up to the ceiling and thank God I’m still alive, that I live in such a beautiful environment, that I have my child and grandson. I thank God every night for each new day that I see.”

But because Kalir survived the Holocaust, her bat mitzvah took on even more meaning, the rabbi said.

“Her daughter is now training the next generation of Jewish children, preparing them for their bar and bat mitzvah. And her grandson is teaching in a religious program,” he said. “Because Hilda escaped, two more generations are passing on our teachings. What better way to celebrate that than with her own bat mitzvah. We’re thrilled it could happen in our temple.”