Bar Mitzvah

It wasn't until the sixth grade that Michael Durst decided he wanted to become a bar mitzvah. His parents didn't belong to a synagogue, so the family hired a freelance tutor who schooled the 12-year-old in his Torah passage and officiated at the ceremony marking Michael's journey into Jewish adulthood, which was held in the hall of a Methodist church.

The rapper Drake has never lacked for confidence, but his latest feat warrants special congratulations. Ten years after dropping out of high school for his famed role on the Canadian television show "Degrassi: The Next Generation," he finally earned his high school diploma after studying with a private tutor. "97% on my final exam. 88% in the course. One of the greatest feelings in my entire life. As of tonight I have graduated high school!" he tweeted last night . "Thank you to my teacher Kim Janzen for spending the last 5 months working tirelessly with me!

What a beautiful picture and article pertaining to Eric Strom and Rabbi Nahum Elbaum on his Bar Mitzvah in Poland. It surely warranted first-page news. What an inspiration for the youth of Jewish faith this picture imparts. It is worthy of framing. LILLIAN FINK Anaheim

Hawk Koch became president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences on Tuesday night, following in the footsteps of his father, Howard W. Koch. Hawk Koch's given name was Howard W. Koch Jr., but as he neared age 50, he decided to make a change. The younger Koch recalled the story in a 2000 interview with the L.A. Times, a year before his father -- who was a well-known Hollywood producer, director and Motion Picture Academy president -- passed away. As he approached his big 5-0, the younger Koch had an epiphany.

Mazel tov, Armand Hammer. The 92-year-old billionaire industrialist will be pronounced a man next month when he celebrates his bar mitzvah, 79 years late, in a swank ceremony studded with Hollywood celebrities. The ceremony, signaling the entry of a Jewish male into manhood at age 13, is anticipated as officials at his Occidental Petroleum are making the most cautious of statements about the philanthropist's health.

In "Sixty Six," an attention-starved, sad-sack boy in 1966 Britain wants to have the biggest bar mitzvah ever. However, his family's business fails and England's chance to finally win the World Cup falls on his big day. So he sulks when he can't have his Super Sweet 13 bash and roots against the national team. Oy vey. Director Paul Weiland, on whose childhood experiences the film is based, may be too close to the subject matter.

He never got an invitation and he certainly didn't RSVP, but that didn't stop Will Smith from crashing Atir Cohen's bar mitzvah at Jerusalem's Western Wall. Cohen, 13, was deep into his Torah reading Thursday when he heard shouting and saw girls pushing against the barrier separating men from women at the holy site to catch a glimpse of the Hollywood superstar. "At first I didn't know who it was," Cohen said.

Responding to a plea from Krakow's tiny Jewish community, which had not celebrated a bar mitzvah in nearly a quarter-century, a 13-year-old American boy on Saturday marked Judaism's rite of adulthood in a land where several generations of his forebears have lived. And for many elderly Jews who attended, the bar mitzvah of Eric Strom, of Stamford, Conn., was the first they had witnessed in a synagogue since the city's thriving Jewish community was devastated by the Nazis.

At his boisterous 50th birthday party, British director Paul Weiland ("Made of Honor") was surrounded by friends and family. It was a far cry from his last big bash -- his bar mitzvah in 1966. It was the day that England was playing for the World Cup. With a soccer-mad nation glued to radios and television sets, no one showed up for his celebration. Weiland relives that fateful Sunday 42 years ago in the sweetly nostalgic "Sixty Six," which opens Wednesday.

The South African judge who led a United Nations fact-finding mission on Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip has decided to stay away from his grandson's bar mitzvah after a Zionist group threatened protests at the synagogue. The judge, Richard Goldstone, accused South Africa's chief rabbi, Warren Goldstein, on Thursday of politicizing the ceremony and making it difficult for him to attend. A spokesman for the South African Zionist Federation, Avram Krengel, said in a telephone interview Thursday that the federation had planned protests at the bar mitzvah, but had agreed with the family to drop them on condition that Goldstone not attend.

On Monday, David Arquette's bar mitzvah made him a man. And soon enough, the divorce papers he filed last week will make him a single man as well. The actor, who has been separated from wife Courteney Cox since 2010, finally filed for divorce Friday, according to court documents posted Tuesday by TMZ . The two met on the set of "Scream" in 1996 and were married in 1999. When their living situation went public after several months in October 2010, the couple issued a statement explaining they'd separated to "better understand ourselves and the qualities we need in a partner and for our marriage.

Stan Stearns, 76, who took the iconic photograph of John F. KennedyJr. saluting his father's coffin during the slain president's 1963 funeral, died Friday of cancer at a hospice in Harwood, Md., said his son Jay. As a photographer for United Press International, Stearns was assigned to cover John F. Kennedy's funeral on Nov. 25, 1963. He was standing outside a Washington cathedral with about 70 photographers when he saw Jacqueline Kennedy lean down to whisper to her son, who turned 3 that day. The boy then stepped forward as the flag-draped coffin rolled by. "His hand went up, it went down; one exposure, that's all I got," Stearns told the Baltimore Sun in 1999.

Mazel tov to the bar mitzvah boy -- 65 years late. Branko Lustig has two Oscars and a slew of film and television production credits, among them "Schindler's List" and "Gladiator" and "Black Hawk Down" and the TV miniseries "War and Remembrance. " He also has a number, A3317, from his years as a young Croatian Jew imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps. He is now, as well, the possessor of a tallit, the prayer shawl given to boys to mark their bar mitzvahs. Lustig was presented with his this month at Universal Studios, as a prelude to the rest of the ceremony, which is set for May 2 at a place he knows all too well: Barrack 24 at Auschwitz, one of the two camps Lustig survived.

Man of the House columnist Chris Erskine attended his first Oscars on Sunday. Here is his report: For my wife, Posh, this night was bigger than our wedding ? not even close. Her thinking? You can have four or five husbands, but unless you marry extremely well, you get invited to the Oscars but once. When she found out, she spun her credit card on her pretty finger and called her stylist. "You can have me from 10 to 2," our daughter warned her as they went looking for a gown.

Even now, 41 years later, the photograph of Seth Cohen's bar mitzvah carries an element of surprise, even shock. There is the bar mitzvah boy reading from the Torah. There, behind him and to his right, is the rabbi, who is also Seth's father. And there, to Seth's left, are … well, it doesn't seem possible, but they certainly appear to be … they're definitely dressed like … could they be? Yes, those are nuns behind Seth, an entire choir of them, dressed in habits, preparing to sing in Hebrew.

The South African judge who led a United Nations fact-finding mission on Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip has decided to stay away from his grandson's bar mitzvah after a Zionist group threatened protests at the synagogue. The judge, Richard Goldstone, accused South Africa's chief rabbi, Warren Goldstein, on Thursday of politicizing the ceremony and making it difficult for him to attend. A spokesman for the South African Zionist Federation, Avram Krengel, said in a telephone interview Thursday that the federation had planned protests at the bar mitzvah, but had agreed with the family to drop them on condition that Goldstone not attend.

The worldwide Jewish community can be thin skinned about criticism of the policies of the state of Israel, but the vitriol reached a new low last week. After members of the South African Jewish community threatened to disrupt the ceremony if he attended, Justice Richard Goldstone, author of a controversial United Nations report on the conflict in Gaza, canceled plans to attend his grandson's upcoming bar mitzvah ceremony in Johannesburg. The Goldstone report, released in September, concluded that both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes during the conflict in Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009, and that both had deliberately targeted the other side's civilian population in attempts to achieve their goals.