“Please humor her and try on the dresses,” my mom told me. We were driving to my grandmother’s house a month before my 13th birthday. I had made the mistake of mentioning to my grandmother that I needed a dress for my bat mitzvah. Her answer, “We have dresses here!” sealed my fate to a long afternoon of trying on outdated clothing.

Her excitement when I got there was unmatched. She brought out a bin of carefully arranged clothing, with tissue paper in between the layers, and handed me dress after dress to try on. There was an off-white dress with a high collar that made me look like a 1950s flight attendant, followed by a velvety black dress with large bell sleeves. She thought I looked wonderful in all of them. I thought they were nowhere near bat mitzvah attire.

Then she brought out the one she had saved for last. It was a beautiful floor-length sleeveless dress with a navy velvet top and a pale blue skirt. There was a bow in the middle leading to delicate buttons down the side. She told me how my great-grandmother, her mother, had made it for herself over 60 years ago. I looked in the mirror, ready to hate it like the others, but my great-grandmother’s creation fascinated me.

This dress I was wearing at 12 years old had been hers, had fit her and had probably been worn to fancy events by her. That dress, just a dress, suddenly turned her memory into a presence.

My maternal great-grandmother had been an Orthodox Ashkenazi Jewish woman. From the stories my grandmother told me, she was frugal, never wanting to waste money on luxuries, yet she always had money for tzedakah because it was important. She was a skilled, self-taught seamstress who made her children’s clothing and much of her own. She was known for her banana cake (not bread, cake) and would arrive for a visit with her grandchildren with a separate suitcase full of those cakes of all sizes. She was the “baby” of five, who cared for her older sisters as they aged. 

I had heard all these stories from my grandmother and my mother, and I had seen photographs, but she hadn’t felt real until I looked in the mirror and saw myself in a dress that fit me perfectly but had been made to fit her perfectly.

My sisters and I each carry the name of a beloved family member as a middle name. My middle name, Malca, was my great-grandmother’s before me, and her grandmother’s before that. Despite that link, I had never felt much connection to the name. It was so different from the middle names of my friends, and I would have to spell it out anytime someone asked what my middle name was. I asked my parents over and over why they couldn’t have chosen a middle name that felt more me. And they answered over and over how it had been special to them because it was hers.

And then that one seemingly insignificant moment going through my grandmother’s closet changed my perspective, made me proud to have her name. That blue dress I had been forced to try on made me realize how wonderful it was to have a middle name, which means “queen,” that is so very Jewish. It made me appreciate having this link to my great-grandmother and her family. My family. How lucky I am to have something I carry with me, as part of who I am, that reminds me of her. That makes me imagine that even though she died before I was born, she probably also loved the apples and honey of Rosh Hashanah and traveling to visit family for Passover.

In the end, I did not wear my great-grandmother’s dress to my bat mitzvah. But I did wear blue, like she had for her own special occasions years before. I opted for a formal navy jumpsuit for the service that matched the top of her lovely design, and a light blue dress for the party that night that mirrored the shade of the skirt of my great-grandmother’s dress. 

As a 12-year-old preparing for this milestone, I had expected the joy to be in the celebration, in the clothes I wore, in finally reading from the Torah in public. But as I stood on the bimah with my family, I realized I had been wrong. Although my great-grandmother’s dress had led me to this realization, the clothing I wore did not matter. The joy was in knowing I was surrounded by my ancestors, in knowing that as I became a Jewish adult, I was part of a lineage.

And I realized that my grandmother’s excitement—her joy—when she saw me in her mother’s dress wasn’t actually about the dress. She had just seen all those connections before I did. 

Vivienne Gilliar-Smith is an 11th-grader from Port Washington, N.Y., who loves reading, figure skating and studying history. Gilliar-Smith is the winner of the 2025 Hadassah Magazine and jGirls+ Magazine teen essay contest, which asked: Share an experience of Jewish joy and/or pride.