To her many admirers, Hannah Edith (Waldman) Blocker was a kindred spirit to Isaac Bashevis Singer's fictional heroine, Yentl, the young woman who yearned so much to study and be treated equally with young men in Judaism that she assumed the guise of one. In 1976, after temple members asked Chiel to start an adult Bat Mitzvah program for older women to whom the rite of passage had not been available when they were 12 or 13, he got Mrs. Blocker to chair it.