A Fashion Week Bat Mitzvah Video Shoot

Stylish Westchester preteens steal the show from Marc Jacobs

By Stephanie Butnick for Tablet Magazine

New York magazine’s The Cut set out to uncover the identities of the pint-size preteens who captured the attention of the crowd outside the Marc Jacobs show Friday during Fashion Week while being filmed by a videographer. It turns out the gaggle of tweens were from Westchester, and were filming a video for pal Chloe Cornell’s bat mitzvah. Her mom picked everyone up after school and brought them to Manhattan for the shoot.

Clad in shirts bearing the Chanel logo—in this case repurposed to stand for ‘Chloe Cornell’—with similarly adorned hats and black sunglasses, the fashion-forward group is the latest entry in the canon of high production bat mitzvah videos, a trend which has some asking whether bat mitzvahs have become too glitzy.

Here’s what Chloe, who is designing her own bat mitzvah dress, told The Cut about their after-school outing.

Tell me about what you were doing outside of the Marc Jacobs show.

It’s was a video shoot for [the] montage for my entry video before I walk into my bat mitzvah. It’s going to play and everyone is going to see it.

Was there a script?

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Memphis Jewish teens explain what High Holidays mean to them

From The Commercial Appeal (from 2012)

Hear what these five teens have to say.  What do the High Holidays mean to you?

As the sun sets Sunday, Jewish people all over the world will celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year of 5773. Rosh Hashanahh is the beginning of a 10-day period of high holy days that ends on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.We asked five local Jewish teenagers to explain what the High Holidays mean to them.

Noga Finkelstein, Baron Hirsch Synagogue

When I begin to contemplate the messages the High Holidays bring us as Jews, ideas immediately rush my mind. I reflect on the previous year, recognizing how to improve my actions and resume on my journey to becoming closer to God.

The High Holidays are a time to extinguish the hum of the computer vibrating as social networking sites flood the screens. Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites do not compensate for the way I feel when entering the synagogue and listening to the melodies sung so beautifully throughout the prayer service.

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My Plan to Give My Daughter a Unique Bat Mitzvah Isn’t Going So Well

By Yossi Fendel for Raising Kvell

My oldest daughter will be called to the Torah as a bat mitzvah this December. I have a bit of chip on my shoulder about it.

Actually, it’s not just her bat mitzvah that I’m cynical about, it’s the whole bat mitzvah “thing.” (I’m using “bat mitzvah” here to include bar mitzvahs too, of course.) As Patrick Aleph argued persuasively in Kveller last year, there are a lot of problems with this ceremony. Despite this, we’ve seen examples lately of young Jews who transform their b’nai mitzvah into something powerful. We just read last month about the young Jews in Chicago who are building a playground. There’s a young Jew at our synagogue who is riding his bicycle from Mexico to Canada to raise funds for the Sierra Club. But even without the grand, headline-making accomplishments, there is significant untapped potential for this rite of passage to be better reflective of the status-change it is intended to complement.

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Planting Seeds of Mideast Peace in Time of War

Can Israeli and Palestinian Teens Bond at Camp While Conflict Rages?

By Yardain Amronfor The Jewish Daily Forward
OTISFIELD, MAINE — “My name is Mustafa, and I am from Gaza,” declared the 16-year-old perched, however improbably, on a picnic table near the shore of Pleasant Lake, Maine. His backdrop — just days after sheltering from the Israeli mortars exploding near his home — was New England’s White Mountains. “I lived 20 days in third war. I come to Seeds of Peace camp to share my suffering.”

Despite his peach-fuzz mustache, Mustafa speaks with the responsibility of a foreign ambassador and in a way, he is one: He’s one of just two Gazans who made it out to this rustic camp setting during the recent war. And now he’s primed to participate in the latest annual gathering of children from Israel, the Israeli-occupied territories, nearby Arab countries and America in a privileged summer camp: an idyll of sports, games, good times — and intense, life-wrenching encounters with children from other groups whom many of them have been conditioned to see as mortal enemies.

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The Diary Of My Great Grandmother

by: Sophie Topping Zimmerman for Fresh Ink for Teens

Every day should be Holocaust Remembrance Day, according to the descendent of survivors.

The Holocaust was an essential part of my Hebrew school education. It was something that was discussed every year. We were urged to ask our grandparents, who came from Europe, about living through the Holocaust. Several people who survived the concentration camps come to speak to us in school. Recently, I realized that my generation will be the last to hear a survivor tell the story firsthand. As time goes on, there are fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors.

Yes, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of books containing the stories of countless survivors. Books such as “Number the Stars,” “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” and “When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit” are read worldwide. Yet these literary pieces — engaging and tragic — are still fiction. Reading a fictional story is not the same as hearing a true, firsthand account of someone’s life. The emotions depicted in a story cannot compare to the emotions conveyed in someone’s telling of their experiences.

It is essential to preserve the stories of those who experienced the Holocaust. Both of my father’s parents were young children in Europe during the war. They survived due to their parents’ foresight and the kindness of others. My grandfather’s mother, Sophie, my namesake, kept a diary of her life during the war. My siblings and I were given a copy of her journal when we started preparing for our bar or bat mitzvahs. It was truly amazing reading about her experiences and the things they had to do just to survive. Through her account, I learned about my family’s resilience. The connection I felt with the past was amazing.

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