Tag #121217 - Interview #101947 (Saul Rotariu)

I had my bar mitzvah in Saveni. It was for my 13th birthday. Before the event, I learned the prayers to be recited during the ceremony. There was a teacher who taught children to read siddurim, and he prepared us for it. Each according to their possibilities. It depended on the training the child had received. I had attended cheder, so when I had my bar mitzvah it was easier, I could already read. He only taught us strictly the ceremony proceedings, so that we knew what to do. He also taught us the speech we had to give. You had to give the speech in Hebrew, but you could deliver it in Romanian as well if you didn’t want to do it in Ivrit. And you had to say a few words: you thanked your parents for raising you until then, you thanked the teacher for teaching you, you promised that, by becoming a man, you would strive to behave like a man, you said what conclusions about life you had reached from what you had learned – for those who attended – at cheder.

In those days when I had my bar mitzvah they didn’t have large festivities as they sometimes do nowadays. At the synagogue people were offered sweets, a glass of wine. Now they have a sort of a name day anniversary, sometimes there are parties. And I received a tallit, siddur and tefillin – to wear on the head and on the arm – and for a while I put them on and took them off [the tefillin] each morning – they are to be worn only in the morning. I did this for two to three years, until school started in earnest, the higher grades, after which I gradually stopped wearing them. By now, with modernism came new interests, new ideas.