A few days before the bar mitzvah, while baking a cake for the pre-Shabbos toameha, I decided to watch a video interview my husband and I had recorded with my grandparents in 1999. We had then just moved to Boca Raton, and my elderly grandparents were visiting our new home. They had recently been contacted by the Spielberg Foundation to record testimony about their lives before, during, and after the Holocaust. They agreed, and then backed out at the last minute. They felt it would be too difficult to share such pain with strangers.

When we heard they were coming to stay with us, we gathered our courage and asked if they would allow us, their grandchildren, to film them instead. We didn’t expect them to agree; we were floored when they did.

We recorded hours of footage that December day in 1999, and my grandfather spoke about our family in detail. On the week of my son’s bar mitzvah, while I was busy in the kitchen, I was determined to confirm some family information for an article I was writing.

I pressed play, hoping to find my answers, and honestly, to keep myself company through the menial parts of simchah prep.

I found what I needed and was about to shut it off when Zeidy suddenly paused his genealogy and said he was reminded of something he experienced in Auschwitz.

And suddenly I wasn’t thinking about speeches or seating charts anymore, or about the cake in the oven. I was back in that moment, sitting across from my grandfather, hearing a story I had somehow forgotten, maybe because at the time I was too young to appreciate it.

Zeidy described how, when the Hungarian Jews were deported in the spring of 1944, the Nazis made no pretense. The Jews were told to leave everything behind; where they were going, they wouldn’t need anything. Bringing belongings meant severe punishment.

After the long, suffocating journey in the cattle cars, they finally arrived in Auschwitz. Those selected for labor, my grandfather among them, were marched to a building and then ordered to undress completely for a shower.

As hundreds of men undressed, pairs of tefillin began falling from their bodies and scattering across the floor. One after another after another — tefillin were dropping everywhere.

After their showers, as the men returned to the previous room and ordered to dress in the striped uniforms, or tachrichim, as Zeidy called them, he saw Polish Jewish prisoners shoveling all those tefillin into one enormous pile.

A mountain of tefillin.

You see, those holy men had smuggled in their tefillin, hiding them close to their hearts, even at risk to their lives. They could not leave behind the most precious thing they owned. Not diamonds or documents, but tefillin.

A mountain built of devotion. Of stubborn, unwavering faith.

My grandfather never forgot that mountain. And now, neither will my precious son.

Because at that moment, just days before my son’s bar mitzvah weekend, I knew exactly what to say. Zeidy had given me my speech, the message he would have wanted me to pass down. That being a bar mitzvah isn’t about the new suit or the centerpieces or the pictures. It isn’t even just about “becoming an adult.”

It’s about the moment a boy is handed his tefillin, his link in our chain of mesorah.

It is the moment he declares, quietly but powerfully, the same truth those men whispered in their hearts: This is mine. This matters. This is worth everything.

For generations, Jews have clung to mitzvos when the world tried to take everything else. Today a boy walks freely to shul, tefillin bag in hand, but he inherits the courage of those who hid their tefillin beneath their clothing at the risk of their lives.

That mountain of tefillin is not only a memory of loss; it is a monument to identity, loyalty, and eternity. Every bar mitzvah boy adds his pair to that mountain, not in tragedy, but in triumph.

I closed the video, wiped my eyes, and breathed a sigh of relief and gratitude. The speech had written itself. The meaning of bar mitzvah, distilled into one image: a Jew holding tefillin close to his heart. Because even when everything else is taken, mitzvos remain. They are the treasure, the inheritance… the future.

And so, at our son’s bar mitzvah, after six daughters, after years of dreaming of this moment, I didn’t give him advice or instruction. I gave him a mountain.

And I told him he is not just wearing tefillin — he is joining all those who clung to their tefillin.

V’eirastich li l’olam.

A new bar mitzvah boy, binding himself to an ancient world, committing to what matters most.

This was my message to my son; my oldest son, my youngest son, my only son. My precious son named for my precious Zeidy.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1096)