Jews have many traditional beliefs directly related to Jewish children: their birth, naming, circumcision (of the male), redemption of the first born, adoption and even baby showers. Unlike Christians, Jews do not hold with the concept of original sin and believe that a child is born completely free from sin. Life, in Jewish law, begins at birth when the baby is halfway out of the mother. Jewish law also allows birth by caesarian section or by other means necessary to preserve the lives of the child and its mother.

Raising children in a secular world is complicated enough but raising Jewish children entails bringing them up in the traditions and practices of the Jewish faith. This becomes even more important because many Jewish children will grow up in a non-Jewish environment and the need to maintain a Jewish identity becomes more difficult.

Jewish girls are special in Jewish society and have their own holiday, not as mothers or grandmothers but as women. When the Jews sinned by constructing the Golden Calf, a holiday – Rosh Chodesh – originally set aside for one of the twelve tribes was transferred to Jewish girls because they refused to take part in the transgression.

In the New Migration of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jewish girls were a big part of the Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe to the United States. However, as is typical in instances like these, the role of Jewish girls has been buried under records written from the point of view of Jewish men.