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Sharing my Bar Mitzvah

By Hank Goldstein, age 13 | October 27, 2023

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COMING OF AGE Hank Goldstein, a seventh grader at The Emery/Weiner School, practices his Torah portion with Rabbi Chaim Lazaroff. Part of the Bar Mitzvah ceremony includes reading from the Torah and taking on a mitzvah project, a good deed for the community or an individual.

My name is Hank Goldstein and I became a Bar Mitzvah on October 21, 2023. A Bar Mitzvah is a coming-of-age ceremony for Jewish men that takes place at 13 years old. Part of preparing for this ceremony is completing your mitzvah project; a mitzvah is doing a good deed for someone or giving back to your community.

As I was thinking about what to do for my mitzvah project, one idea was speaking to me. It is called the Yad Vashem Twinning Project. The main purpose of this project is to shine light about the atrocities that occurred to the Jewish people during the Holocaust. Yad Vashem (Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust) offers a program that pairs you with a boy or girl that died in the Holocaust before their Bar/Bat Mitzvah age. My twin’s name is Haim Cabeli. He was only 11 when he was brutally murdered by the Nazis, along with his two sisters and parents. It is very meaningful to me to have a Bar Mitzvah that I can share with a boy who did not have an opportunity to have one.

My second mitzvah project is called the Butterfly Project. The Butterfly Project is an organization with the main purpose of bringing light out of the darkest times. The part of the program that I was inspired to participate in was having a large group (hopefully my grade at The Emery/Weiner School) paint ceramic butterflies to remind us of resilience and hope. I am hoping they can hang together in the school as a reminder. I chose this project to relate to my twinning project because right now in Israel, there are many Jews being killed again in the war. In a time like this, we should keep our heads up and have the mindset of never forgetting that there is no place for hate. A butterfly is a sign of resilience, and resilience is the main idea of both my mitzvah projects. I hope you remember Haim Cabeli, too.

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