page_title: Bar and bat mitzvah
section_title: Bat Mitzvah customs
hierarchical_section_title: Bar and bat mitzvah / Bat Mitzvah customs
caption_attribution_description: Boy reading from the Torah according to Sephardic custom
context_page_description: Bar mitzvah is a Jewish coming of age ritual for boys, whereas bat mitzvah is a Jewish coming of age ritual for girls. The plural is b'nai mitzvah for boys, and b'not mitzvah for girls.
  According to Jewish law, when a Jewish boy is 13 years old, he becomes accountable for his actions and becomes a bar mitzvah. A girl becomes a bat mitzvah at the age of 12 according to Orthodox and Conservative Jews, and at the age of 13 according to Reform Jews. Before the child reaches bar mitzvah age, parents hold the responsibility for their child's actions. After this age, the boys and girls bear their own responsibility for Jewish ritual law, tradition, and ethics, and are able to participate in all areas of Jewish community life. Traditionally, the father of the bar mitzvah gives thanks to God that he is no longer punished for the child's sins. In addition to being considered accountable for their actions from a religious perspective, a 13-year-old male may be counted towards an Orthodox prayer quorum and may lead prayer and other religious services in the family and the community.
  Bar mitzvah is mentioned in the Mishnah and in the Talmud.
context_section_description: Today many non-Orthodox Jews celebrate a girl's bat mitzvah in the same way as a boy's bar mitzvah. All Reform and Reconstructionist, and most Conservative synagogues have egalitarian participation, in which women read from the Torah and lead services. In Orthodox communities, a Bat Mitzvah is celebrated when a girl reaches the age of 12.
  The majority of Orthodox and some Conservative Jews reject the idea that a woman can publicly read from the Torah or lead prayer services whenever there is a minyan (quorum of 10 males) available to do so. However, the public celebration of a girl becoming bat mitzvah in other ways has made strong inroads into Modern Orthodox Judaism and also into some elements of Haredi Judaism. In these congregations, women do not read from the Torah or lead prayer services, but they occasionally lecture on a Jewish topic to mark their coming of age, learn a book of Tanakh, recite verses from the Book of Esther or the Book of Psalms, or say prayers from the siddur. In some Modern Orthodox circles, bat mitzvah girls will read from the Torah and lead prayer services in a women's tefillah. Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, a prominent Orthodox posek, described the  bat mitzvah celebration as "meaningless", and of no greater halakhic signiﬁcance than a birthday party. However, he reluctantly permitted it in homes, but not synagogues, as the latter would be construed as imitating Reform and Conservative customs; in any case, they do not have the status of seudat mitzvah. Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef holds that it is a seudat mitzvah.
  There were occasional attempts to recognize a girl's coming of age in eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, the former in Warsaw (1843) and the latter in Lemberg (1902). The occasion was marked by a party without any ritual in the synagogue.
  According to the archivist at the Great Synagogue in Rome, the custom of a young woman being called up in synagogue before the entire community dates back to the early years of the Roman Jewish community approximately 2,300 years ago. The community recognized her as "being of age" and acknowledged her in a public fashion. This would support more modern documents that record an Orthodox Jewish Italian rite for becoming bat mitzvah (which involved an "entrance into the minyan" ceremony, in which boys of thirteen and girls of twelve recited a blessing) since the mid-19th century. There were also bat mitzvah rituals held in the 19th century in Iraq. All this may have influenced the American rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan, who held the first public celebration of a bat mitzvah in the United States, for his daughter Judith, on March 18, 1922, at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, his synagogue in New York City. Judith Kaplan recited the preliminary blessing, read a portion of that week's Torah portion in Hebrew and English, and then intoned the closing blessing. Mordecai Kaplan, an Orthodox rabbi who joined Conservative Judaism and then became the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, influenced Jews from all branches of non-Orthodox Judaism, through his position at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. At the time, most Orthodox rabbis strongly rejected the idea of a bat mitzvah ceremony.
  As the ceremony became accepted for females as well as males, many women chose to celebrate the ceremony even though they were much older, as a way of formalizing and celebrating their place in the adult Jewish community.
caption: Reading from the Torah (Sephardi custom)
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