Bar Mitzvah

L

Lon

Well-known Member
Location
Central California
I lived in a mostly Jewish neighborhood when I was a kid and actually thought I was Jewish until my 13th birthday and no one gave me a Bar Mitzvah. :D
 

LOL that's funny but also..heart-warming, because it meant that there was no prejudicial views inflicted on you as a youngster.

I had a similar thing. I Lived in a predominately catholic area ( my mother was a Catholic my father a Calvinist so we were raised (protestants) ..and I used to watch the little girl brides going off to church, and wondered why I was never getting a brides dress.. it was years before I learned that they weren't little brides but going off to their first communion ..
 
I didn't know much about Jewishness until I was grew up and moved to Montreal. I was between apartments and my son and I were staying with a Jewish friend and her two small children in their east end Jewish ghetto apartment on St. Viateur St. Nearby was the St. Viateur bagel shop and bakery, where we would go and watch them make bagels the old fashioned way in the big oven and bring them home to eat with cream cheese. I had never had anything so delicious. That was the beginning of my love affair with bagels and Jewish food. Below is the site in case your curious about how these are made, etc. Of course, when I lived there this place was just a little hole in the wall, not like it is now in the virtual tour.

https://www.stviateurbagel.com/

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For years while I lived in Montreal, I used to go to the Bagel shop to get the most delicious bagels in the world..
Would you believe they were open 24 hours a day ??? Used to go on a Saturday night at about 2:30 am and end up meeting people i haven't seen in years.. it was packed at that hour..
That has to be one thing I really miss about Montreal.. Not only the bagels but the fantastic variety of good restaurants..
 
Wow! Just remembering the bagel shop really made me feel nostalgic for Montreal. Such a great place - seems like that city never closed. Used to go out for desert on St. Catharine St. in the middle of the night.
 
I lived there from 1959 to 1997..
What more do I have to say ???

Lived in NDG, Chomedey, Dollard des Ormeaux, Beaconsfield, and Cote St. Luc.....

Worked all my working years there..
Finally retired in Northern Ontario in a small village of just under 1000 people......
What a difference ........
 
We eat lox and bagels with cream cheese pretty often, lately been adding a couple of thin slices of onion. We also enjoy Matzos around Easter time, they have them available in the supermarkets. My sister married a Jewish man, who has since passed on, and I went to her daughter's Bat Mitzvah, quite the celebration.
 
That's amazing, Steve, you are a real Montrealer then. I moved to Montreal in 1972, and my son was born there. I lived in NDG on Marcil and Terrebonne, Old Montreal, Forest Hill Road, near Cote de Neige and of course a few months on St. Viateur with my Jewish friend. I moved back to B.C. in 1976, so I wasn't there for long at all. It was a crazy time back then in the early 70s.
 
SeaBreeze, I used to wish I was Jewish just for the food, and of course the big family gatherings. Everyone I met that was Jewish was so happy and easygoing.
 
Cookie..
We had a video club on Monkland near Grand for years..
My Grandparents lived on Marcil between Monkland and Terrebonne in that custom house on the East side of the street..
 
Now I've got a craving for a bagel!!

My catholic nephew and his family live in the middle of a nearly all Jewish neighbourhood. They love it there.
 
SeaBreeze said:
We eat lox and bagels with cream cheese pretty often, lately been adding a couple of thin slices of onion. We also enjoy Matzos around Easter time, they have them available in the supermarkets. My sister married a Jewish man, who has since passed on, and I went to her daughter's Bat Mitzvah, quite the celebration.
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Cream cheese and lox on bagels is the best, I'll have to try adding some raw onion, since I love them. We'd also put on a few capers. Nowadays if I want good bagels I have to take a bus ride to the Jewish bakery cafe across town - always packed full. I also sometimes make latkes (potatoe pancakes) which I learned from my mom.
 
QuickSilver said:
I've always been attracted to Jewish men.. So swarthy and sexy..
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Yes, some Jewish men are very good looking. I had a Jewish boyfriend for a while - fun while it lasted. But when the chips are down, they prefer to marry within their own religion, at least this one did.
 
Q.S. I lived my fantasies too. Still remember sweet, serious, impossibly sexy Naftali. Imagine a taller, more handsome Leonard Cohen, with ice-blue eyes. Wanted to marry me, but I did not want to live on a kibbutz. Sigh.
 
You can be Jewish and non practicing, so marrying doesn't lead to a life of one sort of way or another. My last boyfriend, happened to be Jewish by birth, nothing to do with anything in how he ate, loved or any things mentioned for that matter other than he was born into a people born of a group that labeled all their people originating from a group they considered the chosen people, by theirs and some other peoples definitions.

Being Jewish means different things to different people within the culture whether religious or not. I have friends that half practice or practicing by convenience. You have so many variations and ways in which people are Jewish not unlike other groups of people. I once lived in a predominantly Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn, their religious and everyday practices are even more strict than some others though within those groups some are loosening up a bit at the disdain of some, as like other religions that modernise to some degree to keep up with changing times to survive. Ah, the stories I could tell, but, won't.

I can say, I've dated a variety of men from varying cultures and more than my share of Jewish men and the ones I dated were indeed delish. LOL, but, so were Greeks and Irish mixed with Italian. Men, black, white, yellow, red, all good by me.
 
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I worked for several years at a company where I was the only non-jewish person. The atmosphere was lovely and the people all very nice, to me and to each other. I really loved working there, but my husband (army) got transferred and that was that.
 
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