It is not every day a sitting mayor celebrates his bar mitzvah. But last Saturday, as more than 700 people packed the pews at Temple Beth-El in Providence, Rhode Island, that’s exactly what unfolded.
At the center of the ceremony at the Reform synagogue on the East Side of Providence was the city’s mayor, Brett Smiley; the former mayor and congressman, David Cicilline; and 11 other adults who, for the last 16 months, had been studying Hebrew, parsing Torah portions and preparing together for a long-awaited rite of passage. (The ceremony was first reported by the Providence Journal.)
For Smiley, who was raised in a Protestant household and converted to Judaism in 2024, the ceremony was the culmination of a years-long spiritual journey that, until recently, had been a largely private endeavor…