Over 40 percent of Israeli families who had the choice celebrated their sons’ bar mitzvah at the Kosel in 2009, the Western Wall Legacy Foundation reports. Many families from abroad did the same.Several years ago, the Foundation learned that awareness of the Kosel had dropped to the point where a large majority of students in Israel’s schools had never visited the site. The Foundation thereupon established its bar mitzvah program, free of charge and with maximum attention to the families’ needs and concerns. “To our joy,” says Rav Shmuel Rabinovitch, rov of the Kosel , “the project has succeeded beyond our expectations – and the results indicate a re-connecting between Israeli families and the Kosel. There is no place like the Kosel for a young man to internalize his newly-established link with the chain of Jewish generations and history.”
Tens of thousands of bar mitzvah boys have already celebrated the special occasion in this manner in the past five years.
Read the full report at Arutz Sheva.
{Arutz Sheva/Yair Alpert-Matzav.com Israel}
