At the age of 52, Gilbert Schrier celebrated his 13th birthday and his Bar Mitzvah in Temple Mount Sinai, the Reform synagogue in El Paso. How come? Schrier was born in a Leap Year — Feb. 29, 1928 — and therefore his birthday comes only once every four years. “My father was a deeply religious man,” Schrier recalled in a telephone interview. “One of the disappointments of his life was that I wasn’t Bar Mitzvah. This was a chance for me to make up for it.”
Schrier, born in Chicago where his late father, Henry Israel Schrier, was a small dry goods merchant, is a member of Temple Mount Sinai where his two sons had their Bar Mitzvahs and his two daughters were confirmed. El Paso has a thousand Jewish families and two synagogues — Orthodox and Reform. Schrier, who has been living in the southwest since the end of World War II, heads an insurance company in El Paso.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
