'We Almost Didn't Go': Five Families on What Their Israel Bar/Bat Mitzvah Trip Actually Meant

Before we start

These stories are composites; drawn from the hundreds of families we've had the privilege of traveling with over the years. Names and some details have been changed. The moments are real.

The family that almost cancelled

They called us six weeks before their departure date. There had been news reports about unrest in a part of Israel they weren't even going to visit. The grandmother was worried. The father was privately having second thoughts. The bat mitzvah girl — 12 years old at the time of booking, 13 by the time of the trip — had been telling her friends for months that she was going to Israel, and she desperately, quietly, did not want to be the one to cancel it.

We talked to the father for an hour. We walked him through the actual security situation. We talked about the parts of the itinerary that were and weren't affected. We talked about what it would mean to his daughter to go and what it would mean to cancel.

They went.

The ceremony was at Ezrat Yisrael, the egalitarian section of the Western Wall, at 9am on a Tuesday in February. The stone was still cool from the night. Her grandfather, who hadn't been to Israel since 1979, stood three feet away from her while she chanted from the Torah. He didn't say anything afterward for a long time. When he finally did, he said: 'I didn't know it would feel like coming home.'

Her mother told us later that the trip had changed something between her daughter and her father's parents — a closeness that hadn't been there before and that they'd never fully articulated. It was just there.

The boy who negotiated his itinerary

Jared was 13, not particularly interested in synagogues, but genuinely curious about history and archaeology. He told his parents he'd do the ceremony — but he wanted the rest of the trip to feel like a real adventure, not a religious tour.

His parents hesitated. What would that mean for the Jewish content of the trip? Were they giving him too much say?

We helped them design an itinerary that satisfied everyone. The ceremony was held in an ancient synagogue atop Masada — one of the oldest in the world, built by Jewish rebels during the Great Revolt against Rome in the 1st century CE, perched 1,300 feet above the Dead Sea on Herod's legendary fortress plateau. He didn't experience it as a religious moment so much as the most historically significant thing he'd ever done. Both things, it turned out, were true.

The rest of the trip looked like this: a Jeep tour of the Golan, an archaeological dig at Beit Guvrin where he pulled pottery shards from the Second Temple period out of the ground himself, and a hike through the desert wadis north of Eilat.

When he got home, he started researching the Hasmonean period on his own. His mother said she'd never seen him read for pleasure before.

The grandmother who made it

Ruth was 81. She had a bad hip. Her daughter was certain the trip was too ambitious, and spent most of the planning process trying to find a graceful way to suggest her mother stay home.

But Ruth was having none of it. Her grandson was having his Bar Mitzvah in Israel and she was going.

We designed the itinerary specifically around her. She didn't do Masada. She didn't do the hikes. She had a car and driver for days when the group was doing strenuous activities, with her own program — the Israel Museum, a cooking class in the shuk, a private tour of Yad Vashem she'd been waiting 30 years to do.

On the morning of the ceremony at the Western Wall, she walked to the Wall with a cane and stood for forty minutes while her grandson chanted Torah. Afterward, she pressed her hand against the ancient stones for a long time.

'My mother never got to see this,' she told us afterward. Her mother had come to America in 1936. 'She would have given everything to be here.'

Her daughter told us later that she'd been wrong to worry about bringing her mother. That moment at the Wall was worth everything. Her grandmother passed away fourteen months later.

The family that added three days

They had booked an 8-day trip. Tight schedule, everyone had to be back for work and school. The itinerary was good, they'd prepared well, they knew what they were getting.

On Day 5, standing on a rooftop in the Old City at sunset, looking out over the ancient streets below, the father turned to his wife and said: 'Lets extend our trip.'

They extended by three days. The extra time took them up to the Galilee — the Kinneret, Tzfat, a hike through the Arbel cliffs. Their son, the bar mitzvah boy, said the Kinneret was his Favorite part of the entire trip. He'd done his ceremony at the Kotel, he'd gone to Masada, he'd walked through the City of David — and his favorite memory was sitting by a lake in the north of Israel at dusk, eating fresh fish, with the whole family around him.

They've been back twice since.

The Sibling who became friends in Israel

Maya was 13. Her brother Daniel was 16. They got along fine — they just didn't really have much to do with each other. Different friends, different interests. Normal.

On Day 4, the group did the tunnel tour beneath the Western Wall — the underground passages that run alongside the ancient stones, deep below the surface of the Old City. Their guide stopped at a section of the original Herodian wall: stones laid two thousand years ago, each one weighing hundreds of tons, still perfectly in place.

Daniel put his hand on the wall and said, quietly, to no one in particular: this is insane.

Maya heard him. She put her hand on the wall next to his.

They spent the rest of the trip hanging out together. Not because anyone asked them to, it just happened. By the end they were sharing earbuds on the bus, talking and laughing and  dragging each other to see one more thing during the tours.

Their mother wrote to us after they got home. She talked about the ceremony, the sites, the food. And she finished with this: the best part of the whole trip was watching my kids become friends.

 

The most common thing families tell us, after the trip is over, is some version of: we didn't realize how much this would mean. We thought we knew. We had no idea.

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