04/28/2026
When a mayor, former mayor, congressman, architect, real estate expert and some teachers get together every week, you might assume they are a working political group, but you’d be wrong. Instead, they were all learning Hebrew in preparation for their B’nei Mitzvah. The class was the final one for Cantor Judy Seplowin, 67, before her retirement this June. Her adult B'nei Mitzvah classes are typically four to eight students, but this class has 14 students. “This is like the biggest one I've had,” Cantor Seplowin said. “I should leave more often.”
“It used to be that many people could already read Hebrew. So, they would just jump in, and we would have this class for a year,” Cantor Seplowin explained. “But these days, most people ... do not know how to read Hebrew. And it's just about [being able to] read the prayer book and chant from Torah and so forth. So, I've been making it like a two-year process or a year-and-a-half process.”
The current class includes a diverse group of people, from those who converted to Judaism, to those who grew up more secular, and women who weren’t encouraged to have a Bat Mitzvah when they were growing up.
“I think people are very intentional about doing it because they understand that chanting from the Torah is literally awesome,” Cantor Seplowin explained. She chanted from the Torah for the first time when she was in seminary in the early nineties in Israel. “I remember when I went to practice for the first time with it; I don’t think I’d unrolled a Torah since I was 13, and it was really, really powerful,” said Cantor Seplowin. “I love chanting.”
“You have to be able to express the text in a way that your congregants are going to understand what you’re singing about, even if they don’t get the Hebrew,” she said.
Cantor Seplowin found her path through the theater, Kol Nidre and on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean. “I was in theater in New York City ... for six years. I did a lot of stuff, but never on Broadway.”
She was offered a job on a cruise ship and right before she left an old friend invited her to Kol Nidre at her old home synagogue in Summit, New Jersey. “There were these women on the bimah, and the cantor looked like an angel. She had blond hair and sang beautifully, and I thought, hmmm, and tucked that away.”
She spent the whole time on the cruise ship thinking about becoming a cantor, “singing, and dancing my way through the Mediterranean,” was how she put it.
In addition to the political participants, the class also included an animal vet and an Army vet. They canceled class on Veterans Day and instead “we took our Army vet out to dinner. We got a huge table at Red Stripe and we said, ‘We’re honoring you.’ ”
The other vet in the class, Annie Schwartz, 60 of Providence, got a call during class as a horse was giving birth. An equine veterinarian, she stepped out of class to talk the client through the birth. “I realized this was a once in a lifetime opportunity to watch a horse give birth,” Schwartz said, “so I went back into class, and everyone gathered around my phone and watched the foal being born. It was exhilarating and exciting to share this with my classmates.”
Not all the events experienced by the class were uplifting. “When the Brown University shooting happened, the first thing we all thought of was Brett, [Smiley, Providence’s Mayor],” said Wendy Joering, 52, of Providence. The class has a group text and “We were texting him and about a day-and-a-half later we got a message from him saying – you don’t know how much this text chain means to me.” She explained that when the door to the room closed, they were all on an equal playing field. They all became students.
Growing up in Long Island, New York, at a Reform synagogue, Joering was given a choice because her mother had a choice – she could attend Hebrew school and become a Bat Mitzvah or not. “At the time, Hebrew school was really boring,” Joering recounted, “and I just said, I don’t want to. So, I didn’t have a Bat Mitzvah; then all my friends did it and I regretted it.” Her feelings of guilt led her to being confirmed in 10th grade, which she described as “a great experience.”
After her two daughters were Bat Mitzvah, she once again considered it for herself, but when her father died unexpectedly, she thought, “forget it, I won’t do it.”
Cantor Seplowin’s upcoming retirement changed everything. “When I heard that Cantor Judy was retiring, I was like, if I’m going to do it, I have to do it now.”
Barbara Schoenfeld, 72, of Newport, was also inspired by her children. “I have wanted to learn Hebrew for many years. The feeling was especially poignant when each of my three sons became Bar Mitzvah at Temple Beth-El. It nagged at me that to say the aliyah, I had to read the transliteration from the laminated card provided for people who don’t know Hebrew.”
