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.
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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.
