Mass Bar Mitzvah Lifts Violence-Weary Israelis

JERUSALEM, March 29 (AP) - Thirteen-year-old Timon Shadulini stood beside the tan slabs of rock that form the Western Wall and waited for his turn to dance with the old bearded rabbis at his bar mitzvah ceremony.

As Israel's president and chief rabbis looked on, Timon joined about 1,000 boys and girls, all immigrants from the former Soviet Union, in the traditional Jewish rite that marks the beginning of adult life.

Coming a day after a suicide bomber blew himself at a gas station, killing two teen-age seminary students, the ceremony next to Judaism's holiest site was also aimed at strengthening a jittery religious community.

``We are celebrating a bar mitzvah at a really hard time. These children are strengthening us and all of Israel,'' said Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitz, the overseer of the Western Wall, a remnant of the Jewish Temple compound.

The Western Wall sits below the hilltop platform that Jews call the Temple Mount and Muslims revere as the site of the Al Aqsa and Dome of the Rock mosques. Control of the site -- over which Israel currently has political sovereinty even as Palestinian Muslims maintain day-to-day control -- is one of the most cont Two young black-hatted and bearded Orthodox men played keyboard and sang lively, galloping religious songs, as rabbis danced with the children.

Shadulini, the dark-haired boy wearing a prayer shawl and a skullcap, came to Israel from Moscow a year ago and lives in the coastal city of Netanya with his father.

``Yesterday I was a child. Today I am an adult,'' he said, as he waited in line with the other boys to receive his phylacteries, small boxes containing verses of the Bible which Orthodox men bind to their heads and arms with leather straps during morning prayers. ``From now on I will put them on every single day,'' he pledged.

On the other side of a white divider sat Anastasia Sanuchni, 12, and the other girls. Six years ago she moved to Dimona, an Israeli town in the southern Negev desert, from Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic in central Asia.

Continued on page 2: »