DIY bar mitzvah
School set up by local families offers less formal, and less expensive, alternative for the traditional Jewish coming-of-age ceremony
BROOKLINE - The Torah, and the wooden ark that houses it, arrived by car from Newton. Rabbi David Kudan came from his synagogue in Malden.
The bar mitzvah boy, Joshua Rezavker, and his father, Felix, gingerly set up the ornamental cabinet in the function room of a Holiday Inn during a recent dry run of Josh’s long-awaited ceremony.
You don’t usually see a do-it-yourself approach to bar mitzvah preparations, but Josh, a seventh-grader at Brookline’s Pierce School, has chosen a somewhat nontraditional path for his Jewish coming-of-age ceremony.
Instead of the usual bar mitzvah training - weekly Hebrew classes in a synagogue with a rabbi and then additional twice-weekly formal Hebrew classes starting in the third grade - Josh has attended classes once a week at the Newton-based Sunday School for Jewish Studies.
The Sunday School is more than 40 years old, but has no bricks-and-mortar presence.
Rather, it is a close-knit coalition of families dedicated to offering basic Jewish education in the Torah, Hebrew language, history, and culture. They created their own prayer books and hired teachers to lead weekly classes in rented space at Oak Hill Middle School in Newton for children in kindergarten through seventh grade.
Many families who join the school are seeking traditional Jewish education without the heavy trappings of obligation that can accompany a more formal religious lifestyle.
Some are in interfaith marriages. Some want their children to learn about Jewish culture without an expensive synagogue affiliation, which generally runs at least $2,000 in basic dues annually, and often more than $5,000 for families enrolled in additional Hebrew and religious training classes.
The Sunday School, on the other hand, keeps its fees as bare-bones as possible, at $1,000 annually for tuition, with a discount for siblings, according to its education coordinator, Dori Stern.
Josh’s brother, now 25, graduated from the Maimonides School, an Orthodox Jewish day school in Brookline, and had his bar mitzvah in a synagogue, but the family sought a different experience for Josh.
“This feels good,’’ said his mother, Yulia Pittel, a native of St. Petersburg, Russia, gesturing to the casual atmosphere of the rehearsal session at the Holiday Inn, where her husband, the rabbi, and Stern were helping put Josh through his paces.
Most of the Sunday School’s students are from Newton, Brookline, Somerville, or Cambridge, but some travel from Framingham and beyond, said Stern. One of a handful of independent Jewish education programs in the state, the self-funded school works with several local rabbis who believe in its mission.
Kudan, a full-time rabbi at Temple Agudas Achim-Ezrath Israel, a Conservative synagogue in Malden, has for the past two years set aside time to work with Sunday School students as well.
“I think it’s very important to support people who are seeking a way to express their Judaism,’’ said Kudan. “I feel, as a rabbi, I have an obligation to the entire Jewish community to be of service and assistance.’’
“We seek to provide traditional education but also spiritual freedom,’’ said Stern, a former Brookline School Committee member who has been with the school nearly eight years.
The program has always rented space in Brookline or Newton, and has no plans to buy a building.
“You rely on the relationships even more when you don’t have a building of your own,’’ said Stern.
She said the steady growth in interest in the Sunday School - which has about 160 students and has seen an average increase in enrollment of 10 per year over the past five years - may indicate a new openness in Jewish education.
“Judaism is finding ways to change and evolve,’’ she said. “There are so many ways to be Jewish and people are coming to realize that.’’
More than 5,000 young people have passed through the Sunday School, which was founded in the 1960s by a handful of Harvard professors, said longtime parent volunteer David Gladstone.
Gladstone’s wife, Joanne, a Newton native, was a Sunday School graduate herself, as were her two brothers.
Her parents still attend the school’s annual Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur services, which are held in rented space at Newton North High School and regularly attract more than 700 people.
The program allowed him and his wife “to meet in the middle’’ where Jewish education for their children was concerned, he said.
Not everyone in the Jewish community approves of taking a liberal hand with bar mitzvah training, but Kudan said his temple is supportive of his Sunday School work.
“I can appreciate how traditional congregational rabbis could find it difficult to serve families who want to do something out of the norm, or make major changes to the ritual,’’ said Kudan, who is trained in the Reform tradition.
“You want to set and keep standards for the community and affirm the integrity of those programs,’’ he said, but an overly structured approach can limit the spiritual growth for children who don’t start training early enough, or just aren’t ready on a conventional timeline.
An independent approach to spiritual training “allows families to feel a sense of ownership of the ritual,’’ Kudan said. “They feel they can shape it, and it meets their needs and shapes their backgrounds.’’
That was key for the Gladstones’ son, Matthew, who spent seven years in the program and celebrated his bar mitzvah June 6.
On that day, he read the Torah with aplomb, according to his proud father.
“He read it perfectly. I’d put his training up against any synagogue training,’’ said Gladstone, who was raised in Lynn in an Orthodox household. “He certainly did a better job than I did at his age.’’
Erica Noonan can be reached at enoonan@globe.com. 