Mom, Daughter Share Bat Mitzvah

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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

For Kalir, it was a way of 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.