First Haircut marks start of Boy’s Jewish Education

Greenacres, FL — His voice amplified by a plastic karaoke microphone, the pint-size preacher stood on a chair and intoned the 12 pesukin (verses) he had memorized for the occasion. Surrounding him was a delighted crowd consisting of his parents, grandparents, aunts from Turkey and Ukraine, uncles, great-grandmother from Toronto, cousins, neighbors, family friends and a swirling knee-high lake of children.

The reason for all this excitement Tuesday was that Eliyahu Akiva Rosenfeld, 3, was about to be shorn of his long caramel-colored curls for the first time in his life. The ritual, called upshernish (Yiddish for shearing), is practiced mostly by Orthodox Jews.

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Similar to the way his bar mitzvah at age 13 will signify Eliyahu’s becoming a man, the upshernish marks the start of his education. After this turning point, he also is expected to learn the mitzvahs, acts of kindness expected of all Jews.

The morning after the upshernish, Mendy Rosenfeld wrapped his son in a grown-up prayer shawl and carried him into school, where a rabbi drizzled honey on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, to signify the sweetness of the Torah, and classmates watched as Eli licked the ceremonial honey.

Rain was predicted for the outdoor party, but the Rosenfelds prayed to the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, leader of the Chabad Lubavitch movement, for a good day.

“You couldn’t have asked for better weather,” said Eli’s mother, Leah. “It was the blessing of the rabbi.”

Some of the Rosenfelds’ guests, including devout Jews, had never attended an upshernish.

“It’s an age-old tradition, but there are people who have never heard of this,” Leah Rosenfeld said.

The upshernish ceremony is as soaked with symbolism as a honey cake. The Torah, the Hebrew Scripture, compares a man to a tree. Both start from a seed, mature and bear fruit. And just as the Torah says no fruit is to be cut from a tree during its first three years, no hair is cut from a boy’s head until he is 3.

If anyone was happier at the ceremony than Eli’s parents, it had to be the rabbis. With dense beards and wearing broad-brimmed black hats and long frock coats, they beamed and agreed that he had memorized his prayers masterfully, was a poised public speaker and even managed to add a few confident hand-wavings for oratorical emphasis. Yes, Eli most certainly has a future as a rabbi, they said.

Two months ago, Mendy Rosenfeld, an Orthodox Chabad rabbi, and his family moved from Connecticut to open Chabad of East Lake Worth, which holds Shabbat services in space donated by the nearby Avalon assisted living facility.

Both of Eli’s zaydes (grandfathers) are rabbis, as are his father and uncles, so it would not be a surprise if he and his younger brother, Dovi, also enter the clergy someday.

“He’s already a rabbi,” said Rabbi Abraham Korf of Miami Beach, head of the Florida chapter of Friends of Lubavitch, which governs the Chabad rabbis of the state.

Leah Rosenfeld, nine months pregnant, was in a dither of mixed emotions.

“I can’t believe my little boy is growing up so fast,” she said, eyes shining.

A few minutes of mincha, afternoon prayers before dark, were her only tranquillity in a day packed with food and cake deliveries, baking all the desserts for the party, gifts, guests and the last-minute crisis of discovering that Eli’s tiny shirt, necktie and trousers had somehow ended up at his grandmother Sheva’s house in Miami Beach. A friend in need was dispatched, and the clothing arrived only a little late.

Amateur barbers take turns

Eli’s aunt Adina Korf, who traveled from Ukraine for the occasion, performed the small miracle of dressing both the birthday boy and Dovi, 20 months, in their grown-up clothes in less than five minutes with a minimum of squirming. Grandfather Ovadia Schochet tied their small blue neckties and secured matching blue-trimmed kippahs, or skullcaps, on their curly heads with hair clips.

“The kippah reminds us that there is someone above us and our actions are important for humankind,” Mendy Rosenfeld said.

Schochet slipped the tzitzit, or fringed prayer shawl, over his grandson’s head. Orthodox Jewish men wear the tzitzit with the fringes visible beneath their coats.

Dovi has another year or so before his upshernish. For his mother, it’s another year of explaining patiently to strangers that her son is not a girl. But when Eli finished reciting the 12 verses, his time had come.

Family members took turns snipping his locks, which Leah Rosenfeld deposited in a plastic storage bag. The rabbis, from Brandon, West Palm Beach, Miami Beach and a number of other states, cut off curls and showered the family in congratulations.

After all the amateur barbers had taken their turns, Eli still hardly looked like he had lost any hair at all. It was time for a professional to step in. Performing yet another miracle of that evening, Orli Benshimon, a hairdresser and neighbor of the Rosenfelds’, managed to give the wiggling birthday boy a proper haircut.

Mendy Rosenfeld hovered, showing Benshimon how to preserve the peyot, the hair in front of Eli’s ears, while cutting the rest of his hair into an unmistakably boyish short cut.

Rosenfeld recalled his own upshernish and how everybody said he had been a wild child until the haircut.

Watching from a lawn chair, an amused Sheva Schochet teased her son-in-law, “Mendy, you should sit so long for a haircut!”

Without tears or injuries, Benshimon finished the haircut. Eli was ushered to the bathroom mirror to see his new look. As he looked on, pleased, his aunts teased him, “Where’s Eli? Who’s this boy?”

His mother had the answer.

“Oh, my God, he’s a big boy!”