While reading an interesting piece on adult bat mitzvah in the Boston Globe I stumbled upon some interesting biographical information about Hilary and Ruth Anna Putnam. Up until the 1970's it was unusual for Jewish girls to have a bat mitzvah ceremony and in response some adult women began having such ceremonies. Below the fold Ruth Anna Putnam reflects on her bat mitzvah at age 70.
For Ruth Anna Putnam, who also took part in the oral history project, her bat mitzvah at age 70 marked an introduction to Judaism she never had as a child. Putnam, a retired Wellesley College philosophy professor who lives in Arlington, was born in Munich in 1927 to political-activist parents who saw themselves as atheist. By birth, her father was Christian, her mother Jewish. When Putnam was 5, her parents, openly opposed to the Nazis, went into hiding and sent her to live with her paternal grandparents, who initially tried to raise her as Christian. But Putnam, treated as a second-class citizen because she was a half-Jew, began viewing herself as a Jew. She was expelled from high school because of her heritage. "I was expecting any day to be arrested and sent to a concentration camp," Putnam tells me in a voice tinged with a slight German accent.Putnam escaped detection on her grandparents' farm. In 1948, she reunited with her parents in the United States and went on to college. In 1962, she married Hilary Putnam, a Harvard philosopher. He, too, had a Jewish mother and non-Jewish father and was raised as an atheist. The Putnams, though, attempted to establish a Jewish home for their children. At Passover, they would try to get invited to other Jews'homes for Seders, having "no idea how to do it ourselves," Ruth Putnam says, chuckling.
Then in 1975, their eldest son, Sam, then 12, said he wanted a bar mitzvah, delighting his mother. "It was," she says, "like spitting in Hitler's eye." Sam's parents also began studying Jewish ritual and Hebrew and attending services. In 1994, Hilary Putnam celebrated his belated bar mitzvah, and four years later, his wife did the same. When she looks back on that day, Putnam, now 78, sees herself sending the same message as all bat or bar mitzvah celebrants - whether they're 13 or 80: "We are not going to finish Hitler's work for him. We are not going to assimilate."
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Technorati Tags: bat mitzvah, putnam, wellesley college, oral history project, anna, adult women, parents, atheist, jewish girls, college philosophy, philosophy professor, paternal grandparents, political activist, class citizen, biographical information, nazis, judaism