The thriving congregation of Kehillah North London has celebrated what is believed to be the first Yiddish Bas Mitsve service in a British Progressive Jewish community.

In recent years a number of members from Mizrahi, Sephardi, Ashkenazi and mixed-heritage backgrounds at Kehillah have had an adult B’nai Mitzvah, but 39-year-old Tamara Micner is the first to have a service with Yiddish (known as a Bas Mitsve) for her big day.

Tamara (pictured) came to the UK from Canada in 2010. She has spent the last five years learning Yiddish and now teaches it to others.

She said: “I’m a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors from Poland who spoke Yiddish as their first language. I heard it when I was growing up and I decided I wanted to learn my ancestral tongue. I wanted to speak Yiddish with my Baba while she was still alive and now my father and I speak Yiddish together.

“As an Ashkenazi Jew I see it as an alternative to modern Hebrew and it helps me feel connected with our culture and history. I see it as part of my inheritance.”

Tamara also learned how to leyn with Ashkenazi pronunciation and plans to continue leyning at Kehillah. On her Bas Mitsve, she read the Haftorah in Yiddish alongside an English translation, something she has done in some of Kehillah’s regular Shabbat services.

She added: “I also delivered my Dvar Toyre in Yiddish, with English translation. In it I wrote: ‘My language, I clawed it back from Sheol (abode of the dead), from the gas chambers… Speaking and living in my language is one of the greatest joys and achievements of my life, which has opened in ways I never expected’.”

Away from shul, she is helping re-establish a Yiddish theatre company in London. Around 20 people are currently involved including some professional actors. Tamara has also written a pantomime, Yankl and the Beanstalk, which is set in the 1890s East End and is in English and Yiddish. It will be performed this coming winter.

• Picture – Lexi Clare Photography