In the Jewish faith, when a bar mitzvah is held for a 13-year-old boy or a bat mitzvah for a 12-year-old girl, they are then considered religiously responsible adults within their faith.
For 59 Holocaust survivors from Orange County and San Diego who came of age during war or in the years of tumult after and never had the opportunity to affirm their faith through the sacred rite-of-passage, a b’nai mitzvah (the term for a ceremony for multiple people) held Sunday, Nov. 5, at the Merage Jewish Community Center in Irvine was described as an “overdue celebration” of their “Jewish identity and heritage that was robbed from them during their youth.”
When Walter Lachman, 95, was to have his bar mitzvah in 1941, the ceremony had to be held in a schoolhouse because all the synagogues in the community had been destroyed by Nazi violence. His mother died of leukemia when he was 7 and his father of tuberculosis just four years later.
“Mad at God” for all he had lost, Lachman, who had been born in Berlin, refused during the ceremony to read from the Torah. The next year he was put on a train with his grandmother and taken to the first of three concentration camps he survived before being liberated on April 15, 1945.
The Laguna Niguel resident said he found closure properly commemorating the belated rite of passage with Sunday’s celebration.
“I don’t know what got into my head as a 13-year-old kid,” Lachman said, having regretted his decision later in life. “I’ve been looking forward to this event.”
The ceremony was sponsored by the Honig Family Foundation, a nonprofit started by Newport Beach philanthropist and entrepreneur Ken Honig, and featured survivors who immigrated to the U.S. from 14 countries, including Algeria, France, Germany and Ukraine.
“Their Holocaust-era experiences vary tremendously as does their country of origin, age and stage of life at the time of WWII,” said Honig, a student of the Holocaust who helped build the…
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