Forty-five years after his bar mitzvah, Edward L. Moskowitz could not find the photos. They were lost in his garage, in a box, among shelves of such boxes, and were his only remaining evidence of a Shabbat he had shared in the mid-1960s with Marty November, his bar mitzvah partner.

“Any luck finding that photo of you and Marty?” I asked.

I had met Edward and Marty while studying for my own bar mitzvah (we remain friends), and after all these years, I wondered how sharing such a personal event had affected them.

“I know it’s there, I just have to find it,” Moskowitz said, responding to my photo request without a hint of uncertainty.

Marty November (left) holds the recording of his 1966 joint bar mitzvah with Edward L. Moskowitz, who is holding the Haftorah book.

His search would take him back to more than the boxes of personal memorabilia and mementos stored in his San Fernando Valley garage. Eventually, his search would return him to 1966 at Temple Beth Emet, a Conservative Anaheim synagogue a few blocks from Disneyland, where he and November shared much more than the “top billing” and Haftorah blessings.

For many of us who came of age in the 1960s, double b’nai mitzvah were unavoidable; the Jewish demography of the times dictated them. There are just so many Shabbats in a year, and suburban synagogues, whose stuccoed sanctuaries dotted the Southern California landscape like sesame seeds on a challah, did not have enough dates for the oncoming wave of baby boomer b’nai mitzvah.

Moskowitz and his parents originally wanted his bar mitzvah to be solo. “But someone else had a lot more pull with the temple office and got the date,” he recalled. So, with his birthday falling on March 5, and his prospective partner’s on March 1, the two were joined through calendaring, bonded by the portion Terumah.

November remembered it differently. “I liked the idea of having a partner — I only had to do half as much,” he said. “I wanted to do it with Ed.”

Both men recalled that the bar mitzvah class, held on Saturday mornings, was especially large.

“Everything was divided equally,” remembered Moskowitz, who, after seeing how the Haftorah and blessings were shared, thought that a partner might have its advantages after all.

“Everything was divided but the speeches,” November said. “That, we couldn’t share.”

To this day, how to match b’nai mitzvah partners remains a tricky task. Rabbi Steven L. Silver of Temple Menorah in Redondo Beach, who also had his bar mitzvah at Temple Beth Emet with a partner in 1966, has found that now, generations later, he still has “some of the same issues at my synagogue.”

 “You want both children to be equal in abilities. You don’t want a situation where one child outshines the other. You need to match up Hebrew, singing and their speaking abilities,” he said.

Edward L. Moskowitz (left) and Marty November on their big day in 1966

“For my bar mitzvah, I didn’t know the kid at all,” he remembered. The cantor “tried to pair me with someone who could sing better than I could, except my partner couldn’t. I accepted it because that’s what everybody did.

“It was the baby boomer generation and there weren’t enough Saturdays,” he said.

Scheduling bar and bat mitzvahs, he noted, is “particularly challenging at a synagogue where there is only one rabbi and one cantor. It’s customary that clergy take four weeks’ vacation, and the congregation doesn’t want them both to be gone at the same time. So that means each year there are eight Saturdays that are not available, even more when you add in holidays,” he continued.

Silver also has observed the sudden interdependence that the pairing can create. “If one kid falls behind it’s not just [his or her] problem; it’s the problem of the other family, too,” he said.

On the plus side, “Partners feel safer and less anxious,” Silver said. “In the best situations, the partners work with each other and keep each other on track.”

At his synagogue, where there are 20 to 30 b’nai mitzvah — two to three doubles — each year, the division of labor for b’nai mitzvah families can also extend to shared expenses for receptions, jointly creating bar mitzvah booklets and decorating the social hall, Silver said. And “sharing is particularly advantageous for single-parent families.”

He cautions, however, that double b’nai mitzvah are not for everyone.

“I had one parent tell me, ‘I do not want my child paired up. This is my child’s [Mount] Everest.’ ”

As to Everest, Moskowitz and November have good memories of their joint climb and have remained in contact through the years. November attended both of Moskowitz’s weddings, and, just this year, Moskowitz attended November’s daughter’s bat mitzvah.

“Marty also comes to my annual Chanukah parties,” Moskowitz said.

As adults, both have had careers in show business, though they have never worked together.

Moskowitz is a production sound mixer and has worked on such shows as “Golden Girls,” “The West Wing,” “Will & Grace” and “Pushing Daisies.” November is a film editor whose credits include “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey,” “Stuart Little,” “The Mist” and “Aliens in the Attic.”

Moskowitz remembered receiving an Aiwa reel-to-reel portable audio recorder as a bar mitzvah gift. “Who would have thought then that I would make my living in recording sound?” he said.

November also recalled that it was right around the time of his bar mitzvah that his interest in photography began (both men have darkrooms).

Each has three children, and all six had a solo bar or bat mitzvah. But both men feel that had more to do with their synagogue’s settings and demographics than with any negative feelings about a double b’nai mitzvah.

“When I introduced Ed at my daughter’s bat mitzvah, I introduced him as my bar mitzvah partner,” November said.

“It amazed people,” said Moskowitz, who recalled that people asked incredulously, “You still know people from your bar mitzvah?”

“There’s something quietly comforting that there are a handful of us who have known each other since childhood,” he said of his bar mitzvah and teenage years.

November sees the bar mitzvah as the beginning of a “significant relationship,” adding, “I feel like it has bonded us for life.”

Moskowitz, after searching through stacks of boxes for a week, found not only his bar mitzvah photo (he couldn’t find one of them together) but also his marked-up Haftorah booklet, his bar mitzvah record (a recording made by the cantor for him to practice from) and his actual bar mitzvah speech — one page, double-spaced. The shot he found of himself, wearing his new tallit, brought him back to that day and to an almost-overlooked aspect of their pairing.

“My grandparents bought me that tallit in New York, thinking it was the latest style and no one on the West Coast would have it,” Moskowitz remembered.

But then, on the bimah, “While both sets of parents were putting the tallisim around us, I saw that Marty had the same one.”