Judy Stein’s 1957 bat mitzvah was a milestone in the history of Bay Area Jews. Held at Beth Sholom, a Conservative congregation, it was the first time a bat mitzvah ceremony took place in a San Francisco synagogue on a Saturday morning. Unlike other bat mitzvahs of the era, which took place on Friday nights, Stein’s “followed the bar mitzvah ritual,” as we wrote at the time.
Our coverage in 1957 was brief, though our editors did consider it important enough to be front-page news:
Bas Mitzvah Set For Tomorrow In Unique Ritual
“For what is believed to be the first time in San Francisco, a 13-year-old girl will be Bas Mitzvah during a regular Sabbath morning service tomorrow and will recite in Hebrew the prophetic Portion of the Week with appropriate blessings, following the same practice as do boys in Bar Mitzvah.
“The girl is Judy Stein, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Louis Stein. Her father is area director of the Bonds for Israel organization.
“Judy for some time has been studying for her Bas Mitzvah with Rabbi Saul E. White and now looks forward to the event which it is believed will be a new departure in local Jewry. Bas Mitzvahs usually have been held on Friday nights and have not followed Bar Mitzvah ritual.”
That write-up makes it sound like everything was copacetic, but as Stein told me in a recent interview, that wasn’t exactly the case.
“I didn’t know this at the time because I was only 13, but my parents, they had to really argue for it,” she said. Stein is 81 and still lives in San Francisco. “I don’t know exactly how the conversations went in the shul, but from what my parents told me there were a lot of people who were very much against it, to the point of maybe even leaving the shul.”
Her parents, who were raised Orthodox, were always supportive of her receiving a Jewish education equal to the boys. “My mom actually went to a yeshiva high school in New York,” where she received a full Jewish education, similar to boys of the time, Stein said.
Stein’s parents were joined by Rabbi Saul E. White, the rabbi of Beth Sholom, who also advocated for her bat mitzvah, according to Stein.
“And my guess is that that wasn’t an easy thing to do in those days,” she said. “When I said I wanted a bat mitzvah, they had offered me Friday night, lighting candles and making Kiddush, and I said, no, I wanted to do what the boys did. And it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t championed it.”
Despite White’s support, there was a compromise at the heart of Stein’s bat mitzvah, a detail our original article got wrong: It was not done exactly “following the same practice as boys do.” At the time, it was the norm for boys to have an aliyah to bless the Torah, but not read from it. Then they would read the haftarah, the passage from the prophetic books that accompanies each Torah portion.
The compromise that allowed Stein to have a Shabbat morning bat mitzvah did not allow her to have an aliyah. Instead, that honor was given to her father. However, she did get to read the haftarah, a portion from Zechariah that begins somewhat auspiciously given the occasion: “Sing and rejoice, O daughter of Zion, for, behold! I will come and dwell in your midst, says the Lord.”
“It’s kind of odd when I think back on it now, but that’s what they agreed to,” Stein said. “And I was doing the part that at least felt to me the most substantial.”
After years of shul hopping, today Stein is again a member of Beth Sholom. She said she was drawn back after her mother died in 2008. Now Stein is primarily involved as a volunteer in the synagogue office, answering phones, helping with mailings and special projects.
Her bat mitzvah wasn’t her family’s only feminist first at Beth Sholom. Her mother, Toby Stein, was the first woman to have an aliyah on the High Holidays at Beth Sholom.
“What they used to do was they would give the male members of the board aliyot on the High Holidays, but they never gave it to a woman,” Stein said. “And the story I heard is my mother went to Rabbi White and said, ‘Hey, we have bat mitzvah, we have men getting aliyot on the High Holidays — why are not women getting aliyot who are on the board on the High Holidays?’ And so he gave her an aliyah.”
Stein’s 1957 bat mitzvah was the first known Shabbat morning bat mitzvah in San Francisco, but not the first in the city overall. That distinction goes to Marilyn Angel 10 years earlier at Temple Beth Israel, another Conservative synagogue (it later merged with Temple Judea to form Congregation Beth Israel Judea, which in turn merged with B’nai Emunah to form Congregation Am Tikvah in 2021). Angel was one of a class of girls who had their bat mitzvahs on Friday nights, without a Torah service or haftarah reading at all.
Unlike Angel, who had other girls to study with, Stein was the lone girl in a class of boys. Today, though, she is happy to be among the many women and girls who have had bat mitzvahs at Beth Sholom.
“When I see [a bat mitzvah], I just feel we’ve come a long way,” Stein said. “Maybe I had the first one, but it wasn’t really completely authentic. But I started it, and women now have full rights. It makes me feel good.”