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Podcast: North Star with Ellin Bessner
Episode: Greatest Hits: The bat mitzvah turns 100: Meet the oldest celebrant in Canada—and one of the youngest
Description: North Star is on vacation this week, so we're rerunning some of our favourite episodes. This one originally aired March 8, 2022.
On March 19, 2022, 12-year-old Naomi Hochman will celebrate her bat mitzvah at Winnipeg's Shaarey Zedek synagogue. And while she's the first girl in her family to have a bat mitzvah—her older brothers had theirs, and she just took for granted she would enjoy one too—bat mitzvahs are in fact a relatively new phenomenon.
Naomi's bat mitzvah actually takes place on the 100-year anniversary of the very first bat mitzvah in North America. The daughter of a...