B A R / B A T iNS I DE R
BETH TFILOH
adapts b’nai mitzvah projects for social distancing Comstock / Royalty-free/ /Getty Images
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rom high school graduations to family vacations to wedding ceremonies, people have had to either make drastic changes to their planned life events or else place them on indefinite hold, thanks of course to coronavirus. B’nai mitzvah are no exceptions to this, with synagogues such as Beth Tfiloh Congregation having to find creative new ways to keep ancient customs chugging along. “Because of COVID and everything, we’ve kind of changed our format for how we’ve been doing it,” said Rabbi Eli Yoggev, one of Beth Tfiloh’s rabbis, on how the synagogue has been approaching bar and bat mitzvah learning and projects this year. “So we’ve been having all of our bar and bat mitzvah students, there’s
like around 20 of them, we’ve been having them do projects together.” In this new format, the b’nai mitzvah students meet over Zoom once a month with their instructors, with each student doing a similar project to the others, Yoggev said. One example involved students writing to or calling up senior members of the community who were unable to leave their homes, Yoggev said. “We connected one bar mitzvah student with one senior member of our community,” he said, “provide them questions they could ask them, kind of like do an interview, and either call them or write them.” Yoggev, in addition to Rabbis Mitchell Wohlberg and
By Jesse Berman
jewishtimes.com
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