March 18: The First Bat Mitzvah

Judith Kaplan, the 12-year-old daughter of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, founder of the Jewish Reconstructionist movement, became the first American bat mitzvah on this date in 1922 at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism in New York. The event inaugurated a slow wave of change in the Conservative and Reform movements regarding women’s liturgical literacy and participation in the spiritual life of synagogues; by the 1960s, bat mitzvahs were a standard feature in nearly every denomination, including modern Orthodox. Judith went on to become a leading Jewish musicologist and to partner with her husband of 62 years, Rabbi Ira Eisenstein, to build the innovative Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. She celebrated a second bat mitzvah in 1992 at age 82, surrounded by leaders of the modern Jewish feminist movement.

“I didn’t work on it the way kids work on it now, for a half year with lessons every week. All I did was read it through with him [her father] Friday night, and Saturday morning I went into the synagogue and did it.” —Judith Kaplan Eisenstein