NEW YORK — Coronavirus concerns and social distancing are changing the way people celebrate family events and religious traditions, like live-streaming Bat Mitzvahs instead of filling synagogue pews.
“For me, I felt like a movie star,” Tali Feuer, 13, told PIX11 News. “People were watching me on TV. I felt like an actress. It was so fun.”
This is Tali Feuer’s big day, her Bat Mitzvah but because of Covid 19 concerns, Central Synagogue is temporarily closed. So only close family and friends witnessed the ceremony In the sanctuary, along with a young boy who was having his Bar Mitzvah.
Everyone else saw it livestreamed by the synagogue which happens to have the largest Jewish worship broadcast in the world.
“We had people from Florida, Italy, Buenos Aires, Ghana or Israel,” Stewart Feuer, the father of the Bat Mitzvah girl,” told PIX11 News. “All of a sudden it became a global community,” he added.
At religious institutions around the world, whether it’s Shabbas services or the Call to Prayer in a mosque or Sunday Mass at the New York or Newark archdiocese, many are being live streamed because of social distancing requirements and fear of community spread.
But the Bat Mitzvah party afterward for Tali was a different matter.
“We didn’t have the time to change the party,” Gloria Feuer, Tali’s mother, told PIX11 News. “We planned to have 65, but it is getting smaller because of the coronavirus.”
With hand sanitizers as party favors and lots of elbow bumping, the party went on as planned.
