The ceremony was a surprise to everyone, especially to the guest of honor. Ron Eliran, the Israeli “Ambassador of Song,” was getting the bar mitzvah that he never had.
He was 90 years old.
The place was a Midtown steakhouse. The Christmas wreath on the wall signaled holiday cheer.
The rabbi was a radio personality.
“I’ve never done a surprise bar mitzvah,” said the rabbi, Joseph Potasnik, one of the hosts on “The Rev and the Rabbi” on WABC radio and executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis. He once did a bar mitzvah for an 83-year-old, he said. But 90, never.
The back story was this:
Mr. Eliran, who is a much-traveled singer and bearer of an admirable head of hair, grew up in what was then the British Mandate for Palestine, outside the city of Haifa. As his 13th birthday approached, in 1947, his parents did what parents do.
“They bought the food, they invited like 75 people,” Mr. Eliran’s younger brother, Josh, said. “And then on the day of the bar mitzvah, the British declared a curfew. No one could go out. So we never had a bar mitzvah.”
Thus it was that, 77 years later, on his 90th birthday, about the same number of people gathered on Monday evening for the purpose — unbeknown even to the guests — of officially marking Mr. Eliran’s passage to manhood.
There was Hebrew Scripture and song, plus a couple of Beatles tunes. There was steak and shrimp and a cake decorated in the Israeli colors, with a Star of David flanked by musical notes. There were misplaced reading glasses, which made the Torah recitation — a pressure point in any bar mitzvah — a little bit more fraught.
“The whole thing?” Mr. Eliran asked, plaintively, when Rabbi Potasnik gave him a page of Hebrew Scripture to recite. Yes, the rabbi said, the whole thing. Mr. Eliran, ever the pro, rose to the challenge, interrupting the text, about fraternal strife, only once to say, “What a terrible story.” His Hebrew, the rabbi said afterward, was “impeccable.”
Printed on the lining of the complimentary yarmulkes, supplied by the party planner Maxine Kabol, was the credo, “Better late than never!”
When a guest — a former kibbutznik — was asked how she knew the guest of honor, she asked in return, “Who doesn’t know Ron?”
Who, indeed? But just in case:
Mr. Eliran, who was born Menachem Laizerovich in 1934, began his musical career in what is now Israel, and got his big international break in 1958, when Ed Sullivan auditioned performers for a program and tour celebrating the 10th anniversary of Israel’s founding.
With a singing partner, he performed on Sullivan’s show and then toured the United States, performing mostly in Hebrew at first, before ultimately landing at New York University and becoming part of the Greenwich Village folk scene.
“Bob Dylan used to ask me about the kibbutzim,” he said. “I worked with him at Gerde’s Folk City, not far from N.Y.U.”
He performed with Harry Belafonte at Carnegie Hall, and with Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Nina Simone and other stalwarts of the anti-Vietnam War movement. Israel, then, to many represented communes and living off the land, which resonated with the American counterculture. “I was always a pacifist,” Mr. Eliran said, “and I liked what happened with the change of attitude of the population.”
Was he a hippie?
Mr. Eliran demurred.
“Well, I was around them a lot,” he said, chuckling. “I went to San Francisco and I met all kinds of, you know, people. It took a while for everyone to settle down.”
He wrote the music and starred in a short-lived 1976 Broadway show, “Don’t Step on My Olive Branch,” and the following year he created a cabaret revue that The Times’s John S. Wilson compared with the work of Jacques Brel.
“Mr. Eliran,” The Times opined, “is not Jacques Brel.”
Along the way, someone at the Israeli consulate dubbed him “Israel’s Ambassador of Song,” and the name stuck.
But it was within Israel, starting in the 1950s and ’60s, that Mr. Eliran had his greatest success, especially performing patriotic songs for the troops.
“Ron Eliran is an icon, and the radio is still playing his songs,” said Ofir Akunys, the Israeli consul in New York, who attended the party and sang a duet with Mr. Eliran.
“He is a main part of our culture — you know, the little kid from Haifa who actually conquered New York.”
Though the party was a respite from the world outside, some elements of that world filtered in. Several guests declined to speak to a reporter or asked to use only their last names, citing the tensions around Israel and its war in Gaza. Others criticized The Times’s coverage of Israel.
Still, Champagne flowed, cake was eaten. Women clasped hands in ring dances. The floor filled when Mr. Eliran sang his biggest hit, “Sharm el Sheikh,” celebrating Israel’s 1967 victory against Arab states in what Israelis call the Six-Day War.
Mr. Eliran copiously thanked the musicians, some of whom have played with him for decades. At 90, he still performs regularly around the country and abroad and seems to be in fine voice.
“I feel like a history, like a type of a statue,” he said. “Because half of my phone-book names are gone. When I was young, who thought there were people alive at 90? Nobody.”
Over the years he performed at bar mitzvahs for his son, his nephews, his friends’ sons, but said he never felt he needed one of his own. “What I missed was the presents,” he said.
Now that he had his bar mitzvah, did he feel any different?
He did, he said, laughing.
“And I’m thinking about, do I have to join now a temple here?”
The post When the Bar Mitzvah Boy Is 90 appeared first on New York Times.
