Although this was the first big parading weekend of the Mardi Gras season, religious school still went on this morning, with the only concession to the city's festivities being an earlier dismissal time. I'm a little apprehensive about how the students in my mosaic glass class are going to finish up all their projects before the trimester runs out - during-the-week work from me will most likely be needed. It's kind of what I bargained for with setting up something this ambitious, though, so I'll just have to do what I have to do.

A question was asked of the clergy this morning about B'not Mitzvah ceremonies (the ones for girls). Why are more of them done in this country than in Israel itself?

The short answer is simply that the orthodox in Israel hold more sway over the decisions that concern women. Because, in the synagogue, women are not required to do as much as men, a bat mitzvah ceremony is seen as unnecessary. A woman is seen as maturing a year earlier than a man (if, in many synagogues in Israel, the ceremonies were given equal time for both sexes, girls would be doing it at twelve, boys at thirteen), but her sphere is largely seen as being in the home. And, yes, that's the nice way to put it all. Somebody stop me before I start to go into why women's voices shouldn't be heard in a shul, why some men still think that a woman reading from the Torah or even touching the Torah is an unclean act, how orthodox women are separated from men in so many public ways...Here in the U.S., though, things are a tad more secular, and a tad more equal. A good thing, in my humble opinion.

The cantor from a different area synagogue gave a different, more convoluted answer that spoke of how times, traditions, and history could contribute a great deal to such ceremonies, to things that Jewish children over the past few hundred years have seen as, at worst, a form of public torture, and at best, as a ceremony of some generational meaning that culminates in a fantastic party.

In Prague, the cantor went looking for relics of the former Soviet Union. His son had asked him for an AK-47 as a souvenir, which would have been impossible for the cantor to purchase, forget about taking it home. The man automatically opted for something a little less expensive, though he had no clue what it could be - yet. He went into a shop that reminded him of an average t-shirt shop in the Quarter, only this one had memorabilia from a failed decades-long experiment in socialism. The cantor walked away from the shop with a Red Army captain's hat for his son and some extra items he hadn't counted on finding at all. He hadn't even been looking for them, but once he saw them, he knew he had to have them.

A case labeled "Inappropriate Judaica" was sitting next to the one that held the captain's cap. It held some items that were relics from the Shoah. Armbands Jewish people had had to wear to show the world that they were Jews and could supposedly bear any kind of crap the Nazis threw at them until the wearers of the armbands were sent to death camps. A stamp with a Star of David on it that was used to stamp the passports and important papers of those who were Jewish. Some "yads" - pointers that were used to follow the words in the Torah scrolls as they were being chanted by the reader - were there as well, dating from the late nineteenth century. They had been stripped of any jewels they might have had on them, yet the silver decoration on them was exquisite. The cantor paid for the armbands and two yads, and consulted with the Holocaust Museum in D.C. about them. The armbands were fakes. The yads, however, were the real thing. They had most likely been plundered from one of many synagogues that were burned or otherwise destroyed in the 1930's and 40's, or taken from someone's possessions as he was loaded onto a train to a camp.

The cantor gave a yad to his niece on the occasion of her bat mitzvah. She was most likely the first person to use the yad as it was intended for the first time in nearly seventy years.

The cantor was also quite certain, as am I, that his niece was the first woman to have ever touched that yad.

How many women will be missing that chance, I wonder? And how many more will be making the most of such opportunities to take their place in history - and possibly even change it? The mind boggles...

I certainly know mine did.