Marcy Hotz celebrated her Bat Mitzvah in 2021, when she was 73 years old.
“I was 60 years late,” she told the Chronicle in an interview.
She was born and raised in Milwaukee in the 1960s, attending Garfinkel’s New Method Hebrew School at 53rd and Center. While she attended Hebrew school, she did not have a bat mitzvah in her youth, although she did have a confirmation ceremony at age 13, and still has a Bible signed by Harry Garfinkel, the school’s founder.
Going to a conservative synagogue, she said, “they didn’t have a bat mitzvah, boys had the bar mitzvah, the girls didn’t have anything.”
Her first memories of going to temple are somewhat sad ones: When Hotz was 11, her mother died, and the family went to say Kaddish every Friday night for a year.
“That was the first prayer I ever learned,” she said.
In adulthood, Hotz said, she “pretty much fell away from organized religion.” Her first marriage was to a Catholic man, from a family more religious than her own.
“I didn’t have a lot of need for religion, for a greater part of my life,” she said.
That didn’t change until many decades later. After Hotz married her second and current husband, also Catholic, her husband suffered some health woes, along with employment problems, in the late 1990s.
“Because we went through these difficult times, my husband and I, we came out on the other side, in the best way possible,” Marcy said. “He got a new job, his health recovered, his health insurance covered it, and everything worked out well, and we both individually felt a need to return to our respective religions to give thanks.”
“So that’s how both of us got back into religion.”
The couple ended up in Waukesha, and while her husband joined a Catholic Church there, Marcy joined up with Congregation Emanu-El of Waukesha, where the spiritual leader at the time was Cantor Deborah Martin, who retired in 2021.
Martin, Marcy said, “thought it would be a good idea to teach an adult biblical Hebrew class, and I was interested in it, and several other people were interested in it, and it was to help us learn the prayers for Friday nights and learn the melodies and learn to read Hebrew better so we could follow along in the book.”
She remembered that multiple people during the class noted they never had bar or bat mitzvahs. So the class soon morphed into one to study for their b’nai mitzvahs, which included lessons on cantillation, or the chanting of the Torah.
Around that time, the synagogue was transitioning to Cantor Martin Levson as its new spiritual leader, and so both cantors ended up officiating at Marcy’s bat mitzvah, which took place in 2021, about two years after the adult Hebrew class began. The pandemic, she said, delayed the planned date by about a year.
Ironically, Marcy’s father himself had an adult bar mitzvah at age 78 in 2004, the year before his passing.
“I’m really glad I did it. I can participate in leading a service now,” she said, of the synagogue’s monthly member-led service.
Loading ...