Tag #120034 - Interview #87381 (Simon Meer)

The bar mitzvah is the ceremony of donning the tefillin, performed when you are 13. They taught us at the talmud torah, prepared us for the bar mitzvah, so that when we turned 13 we knew how to don the tefillin – you must spin that belt 7 times around your arm and 5 times around your finger, and you wear that when reading the siddur, the prayer book. It was mandatory for every single boy to go to the synagogue with his parents, bring sweets there, prepare a festive meal. I went with my aunt. She baked some sweets – sponge cake, ginger bread –, took them there, and offered the parishioners who were there a glass of wine, liqueur, something to drink – one couldn’t buy soft drinks in those days. The rabbi gave a speech in Yiddish inside the synagogue – there were rabbis who couldn’t speak a word of Romanian –, giving directions to the young man as to how to observe religion, “… for you are of age now, so you must fit into the ranks of grown-ups, observe the same ritual…