‘The joy of achievement’

Local woman celebrates bat mitzvah at age 90

Before Roz Levin Zaret turned 90 this past February, she said her three children asked her how she would like to celebrate.

Her response was she wanted to learn Hebrew and finally celebrate becoming a bat mitzvah.

That was exactly what she did this past Saturday, May 28, at Congregation Sinai, after spending more than a year studying Hebrew on her own and taking private lessons once a week.

And as she stood on the bima, Zaret faced 120 family and friends from around the country and Canada. Sharing her celebration that way “magnified the joy of achievement” Zaret said she already felt.

Zaret said when she first announced she was going to have a bat mitzvah, her great-granddaughter Sophia said, “You’re too old.”

But Zaret, grandmother of eight and great-grandmother of six, wasn’t deterred.

Though she made sure to raise her children in a Jewish home filled with Jewish art, books, and traditions, she never learned Hebrew.

So after talking with Rabbi David Cohen at Sinai, who put Zaret in touch with a private Hebrew teacher, she picked a date, making sure that it was a holiday weekend so all of her family and friends could be sure to attend.

Though “learning Hebrew was a challenge,” Zaret said, it was rewarding for her because it is something she “wanted to do for many years.”

During the service, “I was a little nervous,” Zaret admitted. But, she said, “I was told I did project very well.”

Zaret tore the rotary cuff in her shoulder and was in pain for the two weeks leading up to Saturday, but she wouldn’t take pain pills that day because she “didn’t want to be groggy.”

Zaret read her Haftorah instead of chanting it, and one of her grandchildren read part of it for her, she said.

Zaret was born in Milwaukee in 1915 to Sarah and Fred Grossman, who were “very active in the Jewish community,” she said.

She is a graduate of Northwestern University, where she earned a degree in interior design in 1937. She later returned to school just to take “a few credits at a time,” and was able to earn a teaching certificate in 1964.

At Zaret’s bat mitzvah service, her three children spoke about how proud they were of her. Daughter Ardis Zarem, a local artist, donated to the synagogue a handmade Torah covering in her mother’s name.

When Zarem presented it, she said her mother was a wonderful example of lifelong learning, and the special day was reason to “celebrate life itself.”

For Zaret, it was a day to accomplish a goal that accentuated the “Jewishly oriented” life she has already led.

“Being Jewish has given me purpose and direction in my life,” she said.