Celebrating B'nai Mitzvah in Minyan

CELEBRATING B’NAI MITZVAH IN MINYAN

The B’nai Mitzvah years provide many opportunities for students to actively participate in supportive prayer communities at school. One way of doing this is by celebrating B’nai Mitzvah in minyan. This is traditionally done on the Monday or Thursday prior to the date of the family celebration. We invite family members to join in minyan at school to mark the occasion.

What happens? Your child will be called to the Torah for an aliyah and will recite the blessings over the Torah. We will sing Mazal Tov to your child and present the class bar/bat mitzvah gift. Sometimes a student puts on tallit and/or tefillin for the first time. Sometimes the bar/bat mitzvah child will also serve as shaliach tzibbur (service leader). Also, we sometimes are able to offer aliyot and other forms of participation to parents, grandparents, siblings and other guests.

In many cases, a child who learns to read Torah for the synagogue bar/bat mitzvah service does not learn the Torah passage that we read in school on a weekday morning. Your child may therefore need additional preparation to read Torah in school. If your child would like to read Torah on the date of his/her school celebration, or if you would like to find out whether or not the portion your child is already learning for synagogue overlaps with the weekday morning portion, please contact us well in advance. Please note that without at least one month’s notice of your child’s intention to read from the Torah in school, we cannot guarantee that the morning’s Torah reading will still be available.

Should we bring snacks? Based on much experience, we request that you not bring snacks. Instead, you might consider marking the occasion by making a small donation, either to a charity of your choice or to the School’s bar/bat mitzvah tzedakah fund (which the students will allocate to charities of their own choosing). Some families may also wish to say two or three sentences to the students about their choice of tzedakah recipient. If you would like to say a few words, please let us know.

What else? Please consider inviting family, friends, rabbis, cantors and others to celebrate with you. Keep in mind that in addition to celebrating your occasion, we will also be conducting the regular weekday morning service. During the service, we ask that guests who are familiar with the service model active participation for the students. Parents and guests who own tallit and/or tefillin are invited to bring them and wear them. (We will make tallitot and kippot available.) Upon request, we can provide “buddies” for guests who are not familiar with the service to help them follow along.

Please let your child's minyan teacher know if you would like to join us and the date you prefer to celebrate this special simcha in school.