A record number of Bar Mitzvah ceremonies, approximately 300, took place throughout Monday morning at the Kotel (Western Wall) in Jerusalem's Old City. Celebrants came from Israel and abroad, including 23 boys from the rocket-battered western Negev. 
23 celebrations were sponsored by a family from Miami.
The Bar Mitzvah ceremony welcoming Jewish 13-year-old boys into the religious obligations of manhood includes honoring the Bar Mitzvah with a Torah reading, as well as his reciting blessings and putting on tefillin (known in English as "phylacteries") for the first time as an adult.
Members of the Western Wall Heritage Foundation said that they do not recall so many parallel Bar Mitzvah events in one day at the Western Wall Plaza. The Foundation itself helped organize 180 of the celebrations as part of its project to provide free assistance to any Jewish family that wishes to celebrate a Bar Mitzvah at the Kotel. The Foundation provides guidance for the Bar Mitzvah boy in putting on tefillin, as well as arranging for a prayer quorum and for someone to read the Torah in accordance with tradition.
Another 23 celebrations were sponsored by the Palik family from Miami that came to mark the Bar Mitzvah of their own 13-year-old son, Shmulik, on Israel's 60th Independence Day. Shmulik Palik has been selected to light a torch in the central Independence Day ceremony in the name of children in the Diaspora.
The Paliks decided to host Bar Mitzvah children from Sderot and surrounding towns as well, and to provide each young man with a tallit (prayer shawl), tefillin, and a celebratory meal for him and his family. Before their Bar Mitzvah ceremonies, the children from the western Negev were introduced to Torah scribes and saw how the texts of the tefillin were written.
More than 100 Bar Mitzvah ceremonies and celebrations were organized by individual families on their own.
Chief Rabbi of the Kotel and the Holy Places, Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch, expressed satisfaction with the multiple Bar Mitzvah celebrations. The fact that so many Jews come from Israel and abroad to mark their children's coming of age in the Western Wall Plaza is an indication of the deep connection between the Jews, Jerusalem and the Kotel.
"There is no more appropriate place to celebrate a Bar Mitzvah than at the Western Wall," Rabbi Rabinovitch said, "a place that connects a Jewish child with the chain of tradition and generations of his heritage, the source of Jewish people's strength and hope. I invite all Jewish children to come and celebrate their Bar Mitzvah at the Western Wall."