In an evening dedicated to nashim tzidkaniyot, Bruriah’s sixth grade honored Jewish women past and present. As part of their bat mitzvah program, the students took the opportunity to learn about their individual family heritage and discover their roots. Elana Frank’s grandmother, Jane Behrmann, who traveled from Springfield, Virginia, said, “It is a blessing to be here.”

Mesorah was the backdrop to the event and the students worked during the entire second half of the school year to identify an ancestor and write about the city they came from and their life. The students learned about family heirlooms and artifacts, like tefillin, recipes and jewelry, and how to write a museum label for the artifact.

To pull together the framework of their heritage, the students created their family trees dating back to their great-grandparents and wrote memoirs focusing on their names and a connection to an ancestor. The students paid tribute to their mothers and grandmothers, with performances throughout the evening highlighting songs about the importance of mothers. The students created a video which included the song, “My Dear Ima, I’m Sending This Letter” and answers to questions such as, what do they admire most about their mothers and what is something their mothers do that they hope to bring to their own home? Some of the other research the students conducted was about our imahot, Devorah HaNeviah and Rut—and about a modern day person who is considered a righteous woman, for example Rebbetizen Kanievsky, Mrs. Newman from Bruriah and Sherri Mandell. The meaning of the evening wasn’t lost on the Ponte family, which included four generations of women. Shirley Kretsch, great grandmother of Rachel Ponte said, “I enjoyed listening to the children honor their education and talk about their mothers. It was very thrilling.”