A Rite of Passage After the Journey Has Begun : Religion: 11 adult women complete the arduous study of Hebrew and celebrate a group bat mitzvah normally reserved for girls nearing puberty.

So you think it’s easy for grown women to learn Hebrew for a Jewish rite of passage ceremony ordinarily reserved for girls on the brink of puberty?

Have they got a story for you.

Last week, 11 women from the ages of 26 to 65 chanted ancient Hebrew prayers before more than 300 family members and friends in a group bat mitzvah at Congregation Tifereth Jacob in Manhattan Beach.

The ceremony, monitored by two Hebrew scholars whose only role is to correct any mispronunciations, culminated nine months of weekly study in which the women devoted hundreds of hours to the painstaking study of the ancient language, laws and traditions of their Jewish faith.

“I’ll be a much safer driver,” predicted Serene Sulpor, a Manhattan Beach realtor who memorized her Hebrew prayers by listening to tape-recordings of them in her car.

Sulpor, 42, said she has wanted a bat mitzvah ever since she read “The Diary of Anne Frank” as a teen-ager. But it wasn’t until she began planning her daughter Jessica’s bat mitzvah last year that she signed up for a class of her own.

“I wanted to make sure we are not an endangered species, that Judaism is kept alive,” Sulpor said. “I wanted not only to learn more about my past, but also be another link in the chain of Jewish people.”

For the ceremony itself, each woman was assigned to read, actually sing, a paragraph from the Torah, the parchment scroll that contains the books of Jewish law. Before and after their readings, four women had the honor of carrying the scroll in a procession around the synagogue.

As part of the Saturday morning ritual, the women draped specially embroidered prayer shawls around their shoulders. To show their reverence for the law, they kissed the ends of their shawl and touched it to the parchment.

For Pearl Spero, who at 65 was the oldest member of the group, the bat mitzvah ceremony didn’t even exist when she was a teen-ager.

Under traditional Jewish law, only men observe the ceremony, which for them is called a bar mitzvah. But in the past 30 years, Reform and Conservative synagogues have been making the ceremony available to women as well.

“It was an expression of the idea that if it’s appropriate for a young man to take on the responsibilities and commitments that go along with being a Jew, then it seems important that women too should have access to a similar ceremony,” said Rabbi Mark Hyman of Congregation Tifereth Jacob. “It’s an initiation, if you will.”

Spero, who is now a grandmother, was persuaded to study for her bat mitzvah by the youngest of her three sons, Gary, who attended a university in Israel and recently finished law school.

“When I was growing up during the Depression, girls didn’t even go to Hebrew school,” said Spero, a Torrance resident. “I always wanted to learn Hebrew, to really participate in Judaism . . . but I was worried about whether I could keep up with everyone. I decided I better do it now before I go blind.”

It was a similar story for computer program analyst Laura Schwartz, 43, of Manhattan Beach, who grew up in a traditional Jewish family that did not believe it was proper for girls to study the Torah. She remembers how crushed she felt to learn that the bar mitzvah preparations her parents made for her older brother would not occur for her.

“I was devastated,” she said. She even stopped going to religious school.

Coming back to the Torah as an adult was difficult but deeply rewarding, many women said. Several women said their maturity and interest in Jewish issues, as well as the blossoming friendships that developed among them, sustained them through the arduous task of learning Hebrew, even if their minds were less supple than they had hoped.

The women brought a variety of backgrounds to their bat mitzvah preparations. Some of them grew up in families that observed kosher food laws, while others rarely, if ever, went to synagogue. Some had years of Hebrew training, whereas others had never learned the first three letters of the alphabet. Two of the women had converted to Judaism as adults.

Several women said they decided to study for their bat mitzvahs while watching their own children prepare for the ceremony, while others said they were drawn to the experience to learn how to take a more active role in the practices of their heritage.

Businesswoman Judy Eisenberg, 44, said she developed a strong urge to study her roots after moving to the South Bay from New York.

“Where I grew up in New York, you would walk into a store around a Jewish holiday and you would naturally see Jewish items,” Eisenberg said. But she said she cannot take her culture for granted in the South Bay, which has a relatively small Jewish population.

“For me to be Jewish in the South Bay means I have to take more responsibility and be more proactive about it,” said Eisenberg, of Manhattan Beach. “To practice Judaism here, it really takes more effort.”

The adult bat mitzvah class was a first for the tiny congregation, but the response was so overwhelming that Hyman said he plans to teach it every other year.

“We will do it until everyone who ever wanted to be bar or bat mitzvahed will be,” Hyman said.

The class originally included 15 women, but sickness and competing demands forced four of them to drop out. Beginning in late October, the women met every Monday evening for two hours at the synagogue, a converted school auditorium in Manhattan Beach. They spent the first hour on Hebrew instruction and the second on Jewish issues.

As part of their Jewish training, the women practiced charity once a month by cooking and serving meals to about 160 homeless people for Project: NEEDS, an outreach program run by St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in Redondo Beach.

Their classroom discussions were often so thought-provoking that many women said they later had trouble falling asleep. “The lessons would go over and over in my head for two hours after class,” Eisenberg said.

Most of the women said learning Hebrew--the ancient language found in the Torah, which is significantly different from the one used in the modern state of Israel--was the most difficult part of the process. The reason: The Hebrew script found in the Torah does not include any vowels.

“At one point, I was so frustrated, I was ready to drop, but they supported me,” said 62-year-old Ruth Shults, president of the congregation.

Shults, who converted to Judaism five years ago, found the often guttural pronunciations of Hebrew almost unspeakable at first. Fearing that she would never learn her reading portion, she drove all the way to Yosemite with an enlarged copy of it taped to her steering wheel.

But at the final rehearsal and the bat mitzvah itself last week, Shults recited her Torah reading without a single mistake. The other women in the class erupted into applause and threw their arms around her in delight.

“I knew I did it right and everyone else knew I did it right and they came up afterward and said how pleased they were,” said Shults, who had responded to their clapping with a whoop of joy. “I really feel one of the supporting things was the friendships. If I was doing it on my own, I wouldn’t have accomplished it.”