For most Bar or Bat Mitzvahs, the coming-of-age ceremony is a partial introduction to service in the Jewish philanthropic community. There is usually a project that the young person creates that is tied to bettering the world in some way.
But, for Grace Benator, who recently celebrated her Bat Mitzvah at the age of 88, the ceremony at Sunrise at Huntcliff Summit in Sandy Springs was a reversal of the process. For Benator, the religious service at the senior community on Roswell Road came as the crowning achievement of decades of service and philanthropy.
She grew up in the Sephardic congregation, Or Ve Shalom, which is now located in the Druid Hills neighborhood, just west of the massive new Emory Children’s Hospital and health campus off I-85. But when she was born in the 1930s, it was still the center of a community in the south end of the city by Jews who, like her parents, were mostly immigrants from Turkey and the Isle of Rhodes in the Mediterranean. [She spent a dozen years in the synagogue’s Sunday School but had only two years of Hebrew school. Until about 20 years ago, the traditional congregation didn’t allow young women to become Bat Mitzvahs.
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But this year on Oct. 20, she stood before a standing room only audience at a Friday night service that included about 20 of her own children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. She spoke about her own interpretation of the spiritually righteous life of Noah and about her lifelong desire to celebrate her spiritual coming of age after all these years.
When famed Sephardic anthropologist Ruth Behar visited Congregation Or Ve Shalom, Grace Benator was one of the tour guides.
“I have always wanted to be a Bat Mitzvah,” she said, “not because of the many presents you receive, but so I could be a greater participant in the service.”
As Grace Levy, an 18-year-old slender, blonde beauty, she caught the eye of Asher…
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