Lizzie Sturgis could have picked any of a number of causes to devote herself to for her bat mitzvah. She chose a heavy one: the genocide in Sudan.
Her mother, Lynne Wasley of Novato, had been loading Lizzie with materials on worthy causes — including the situation in Darfur, Sudan, about which she has been trying to raise awareness.
So it wasn’t too surprising that Lizzie chose the Sudan, and she plans to donate a portion of her bat mitzvah money to aid the refugees.
What is a bit surprising is that Lizzie, whom the Wasleys adopted when she was 8, was just 10 years old when she converted to Judaism. In the short time since, she has flung herself into her new religion. And now, three years later, on Saturday, Sept. 18, she will become a bat mitzvah.
Both decisions were her own.
What’s happening in Sudan now “is a genocide and lots of people are dying,” said Lizzie, who had been reading a lot about the Holocaust and World War II, and recently read “The Diary of Anne Frank.” “I really don’t want what happened in the Holocaust to happen again.”
The almost 13-year-old lived with her birth mother for the first six and a half years of her life. But her birth mother suffers from mental illness, and when her conditioned worsened she could no longer take care of her daughter.
A foster child from ages 6 to 8, Lizzie lived with a few families before ending up with Wasley and her husband, Paul, who have five daughters between them.
With Lizzie, “we very much bonded to her and she to us. We wanted to adopt her,” said Wasley, who has fostered nine children over the years. The bonding was mutual, and so the Wasleys adopted Lizzie five years ago.
When she was with her birth mother, Lizzie went to church with her a few times. But after living with her adoptive parents, she found she really liked going to synagogue — in this case, Cotati’s Congregation Ner Shalom.
“I got a good feeling” from going, she said.
When her adoptive father converted several years ago, Lizzie decided to follow suit.
“I was totally surprised when she decided to convert,” said Lynne Wasley. “It was completely her choice.”
When it came time for the mikvah, or ritual bath, although Lizzie had been told about it, she didn’t really know what to expect. Asked about the experience, she said, “The fact that I was Jewish now was what was exciting to me, not the actual bath.”
But that excitement didn’t carry over into having a bat mitzvah initially. At first, Lizzie told her parents she didn’t want one. Then she saw her older sister have one.
“She had a good time doing it,” said Lizzie. “I knew it would be a lot of work, but it would be a really good memory I’d look back on.”
And it was a lot of work, she admits — difficult, yet rewarding.
“There are those few letters you have to clear your throat for, and those get me all the time,” she said.