Al Berger missed out on a bar mitzvah when he was 13 years old. Now, at the tender age of 99, he’s finally ready to say, “Today I am a man.”
Berger is one of seven seniors at a Petaluma assisted-living facility to take part in an adult b’nai mitzvah class. The students range in age from 70 to Berger’s impressive near-triple digits, but all are as eager as young yeshiva bochers to read from the Torah.
That they will do at Shabbat afternoon services on Saturday, May 22 in the dining hall of Springfield Place.
The seven will read aloud the Ten Com-mandments — in this case from a Holocaust Torah scroll belonging to Gan HaLev, a San Geronimo Valley congregation — and each will deliver a short speech.
“It feels great,” says the remarkably sharp Berger of his big day, “because I neglected to have [a bar mitzvah] years ago. I lived through two depressions, I have six major illnesses and had four operations. This is something that could be done, and I decided to do it.”
The b’nai mitzvah teacher, Judith Helman, is a former religious-school principal and more recently a volunteer with the Shabbat outreach program of the S.F.-based Jewish Family and Children’s Services. She began leading Kabbalat Shabbat services at North Bay senior residences, including Springfield Place, one Friday night a month.
She says preparing seniors like Berger for a bar or bat mitzvah is very different from tutoring 12-year-olds, as she used to do at Congregation Shomrei Torah in Santa Rosa.
“Ninety percent of working with kids is technical,” she says. “How to read trope; the outline of the service. An adult learns synagogue skills, how to give a dvar Torah [biblical interpretation] and how to share their journey.”
As most of the b’nai mitzvah students do not read Hebrew, Helman prepared a CD, complete with Torah blessings and a reading of the Ten Commandments (typically part of services around the time of Shavuot).
Says Berger, whose birthday is in November, “We’re studying how the whole thing started, how God created the world, and the reason he gave for making the Ten Commandments. We followed him and we did all right.”
When her class meets, Helman has students run through the elements of the service. But just as often, they talk about what they might want to say before family and friends on the big day.
“A lot of the people grew up with strong Jewish identity but not much practice or education,” Helman says. “For some of them, the fact that they wanted to have a bar/bat mitzvah itself is a major milestone.”
That’s true for Berger, who grew up in New York City, became a schoolteacher and, later, principal of P.S. 97 in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst.
He says when he was growing up his parents were “so busy just making a living, with six kids, they didn’t have too much time for Judaism.”
Ten years ago he relocated to Northern California to be near his daughter, who cared for him. Five years ago he moved to Springfield Place. Berger isn’t the oldest resident there: One has him beat by three years, clocking in at an august 102 years of age.
But you’re only as old as you feel, and right now Berger feels very good about checking the bar mitzvah off his bucket list.
“I’m very glad to have the Jewish education,” he says. “If I should go to my grave without knowing that stuff, maybe they won’t let me in.”