Different Journeys For 12 Bat Mitzvahs Holocaust Survivor Steers Proud Women

One by one, the velvet-covered Torah scrolls are lifted from the ark and passed into trembling hands.

Their arms wrapped around the scrolls, 12 women step proudly through the Inland Northwest’s only synagogue. The faithful rush to the aisles as they pass, reaching out to touch the precious cargo with the fringes of their prayer shawls.

By becoming a bat mitzvah, these women were embracing more than Scripture. They were doing more than leading a congregation in prayer. They were claiming as their own one of the oldest faiths on Earth Judaism.

As a group, they include Jews who were born into the faith and those who converted, some who have been sure and steady in their religious practice and some who have drifted.

Their paths intersected this weekend in emotional ceremonies that forever linked them to each other and Jews around the world.

The group was grounded to the past by a 79-year-old Holocaust survivor. Eva Lassman embraced the rigorous months of training required to become a bat mitzvah - “Daughter of the Commandments.”

While learning to read and chant Hebrew, the others discovered they, too, have profound spiritual tales to tell.

As a teenager in Lodz, Poland, Lassman rebelled against her parents’ ultra-Orthodox faith.

Questions and doubts were frowned upon. Women weren’t permitted a voice in temple, let alone the right to participate in worship services.

While Jewish boys have always gone through a bar mitzvah at age 13, girls didn’t get an equal coming-of-age ceremony until 30 years ago in Conservative congregations, and early this century in Reform synagogues.

“I felt I was in an enclosure and I could not move,” Lassman says with a thick Polish accent, one of the few things still with her from the Old World.

Then came World War II and a forced march through three Nazi concentration camps, each more brutal than the last. Lassman, then 26, was closer to dead than alive when she was liberated by Russian soldiers in 1945.

Her first thoughts were of survival, of food and shelter. Then she thought of her family. Her baby brother, who was 12 when she last saw him; her older brother, his wife, their baby; her aunts and uncles. Thirty-two relatives, all dead.

“It was by the grace of God that I was spared,” she says. “I knew there must have been a purpose.”

It was then that she realized her faith wasn’t something that would hold her back. It would provide the strength to start over.

Seventy years ago, Adie Goldberg’s father was preparing for his bar mitzvah in St. Louis. He brought two curious non-Jewish friends to Hebrew school one day, only to be scolded by the rabbi for defiling the synagogue.

As punishment, the rabbi canceled the bar mitzvah.

Ervin Goldberg vowed his children would never suffer the same humiliation.

But Adie still loved being Jewish. As a teenager, she was active in her synagogue. She was planning to go to college in Israel.

Then she caught her rabbi having an intimate relationship with one of her friends. She was disillusioned and devastated. She didn’t go to Israel. She didn’t set foot in another synagogue until her father’s death 21 years later.

“I came to realize I had rejected a tradition that was the source of my sustenance because of one man’s mistake,” says Goldberg, now 44.

“This is a healing of my dad’s story and a healing of my own story.”

Lassman married a fellow Holocaust survivor. They had two sons by the time they arrived here with help from Spokane Jews.

On their first Yom Kippur in their new home, her husband walked to the synagogue for services while Eva waited for the baby sitter. Answering a knock on the door, she found a group of Jewish women who dropped off the sitter and offered her a ride.

“You are driving a car on the Day of Atonement?” she asked her new friends.

It was both scary and exhilarating to have her suspicions confirmed: There was more to faith than rules and regulations.

“There are a lot worse transgressions than driving on Yom Kippur,” she would later tell her husband.

Sue Grant’s Jewishness was part of her family’s past, not her day-to-day life.

Her grandmother emigrated from Poland after World War I. Her family belonged to a Seattle synagogue. But as an adult, Grant, 41, was ambivalent about Judaism.

Then she saw the movie “Schindler’s List,” and suddenly she was mourning. She began attending Temple Beth Shalom on the South Hill.

When she enrolled her youngest son in Hebrew school three years ago, she agreed to study the religion herself. Her bat mitzvah is the culmination of that promise.

“I am confirming my identity as a Jew, to honor the memory of those six million that were slaughtered,” she says.

After moving to Spokane, Lassman’s first priority was to learn English. She left the radio on all day, hoping to pick up the new language.

One summer morning, while hanging laundry on a line, a neighbor told her to turn down the radio.

She did, without questioning. She was a woman, a foreigner, a Jew. Inside her was a fear that would take a lifetime to tame.

“I was really still afraid that if I did not do the right thing, something (bad) would still happen to me,” she says.

SuCarolyn Green, 58, had spent her adult life searching for a religious home, but nothing she tried seemed like a good fit.

On the eve of gall bladder surgery in 1996, her doctor, a Jew, offered to pray for her.

It was Yom Kippur. Worried about the surgery, Green went to Temple Beth Shalom for the Kol Nidre service.

“It felt like coming home,” she says.

For years, the Lassmans closed doors and windows whenever they needed to talk about the Holocaust. Their three sons were teenagers before they found out why they had no grandparents, aunts or uncles.

Ten years ago, Eva broke the silence.

It wasn’t enough just to have survived, to have gone on to have a normal life, a happy marriage.

“Maybe that was why God saved me,” she says. “So I could tell the story.”

Now she speaks to schools and clubs almost every week.

It’s never easy. Her mouth dries up, tears flow. Once, among a pile of thank-you notes, a high school senior wrote that he didn’t believe her, didn’t believe the Holocaust really happened.

Still, she continues.

“It is the only way I can avenge the deaths of my family.”

Shirley Grossman was the only Jew in her high school in Trail, British Columbia. Her mother, a Russian immigrant, was very strong and very bitter. She had fled persecution at the hands of Russian Christians.

“I grew up knowing that I am what I am. I am a Jew and I must never be anything else,” says Grossman, 55.

With that identity came shame and embarrassment, but never pride or joy.

Then Grossman watched her daughters make their bat mitzvahs. They were magical occasions.

Grossman joined the 11 other women in the b’not mitzvah class hoping to learn more about what makes her faith so mystical.

“We have prayers that have been around forever; they have profound meaning,” she says. “It was a main goal for me to really understand my prayers. And now I do.”

When Sue LaRue, 49, and Becky Cress, 29, were called to the Torah on Saturday by their Hebrew names, they were identified as converts to Judaism.

The mother and daughter discovered several years ago from genealogical research that they were Jewish by blood. They began exploring the religion.

With their dark hair and eyes, many members at the temple assumed they were Jews by birth.

“I’m a Jew by blood and a Jew by choice, which not everybody can say,” Cress says. “But sometimes I feel like I don’t fit into either category.”

When they decided to pursue a bat mitzvah, it was because they wanted to be fully responsible and informed about their faith.

“It’s been a tough road to go down,” Cress says. “I look at Eva, being a Holocaust survivor, and I don’t even feel worthy to call myself a Jew. But she is one of the most accepting.”

For three years, Lassman has been the membership chairwoman of the Spokane chapter of Hadassah, a powerful Jewish women’s club that funds medical and ethical causes worldwide.

Known for her persistence in recruiting members, Lassman had been eyeing Goldberg, a psychologist, and Stacie Bering, a doctor, for months.

Goldberg and Bering relented last fall, with one condition: Lassman had to join them in going through the bat mitzvah training.

“I am the only one in the group without a college education,” Lassman protested. “I am by far the oldest. My voice is not really that good. I carry a tune in a bucket.”

During the Shabbat service Saturday morning, they sat together on the steps of the altar in front of the congregation.

Twelve voices sang songs and prayers. They rang out high and clear, low and somber, soft and melodious.

When their Hebrew names were called, each woman accepted with pride and joy the religious and ethical obligations of Judaism.

“Now it’s come full circle. I am called to the Torah,” Lassman said. “So now I am really related.”