This April, Lexi Rosenbloom will celebrate her bat mitzvah in front of more than a hundred friends and family members. Like most Jewish 12- or 13-year-olds, she will be called to read from the Torah before a backdrop of stunning stained-glass windows, a moment for which she has been studying for the past two years.

But instead of having the service at the family's synagogue, with clergy in tow, the Rosenblooms are creating a sanctuary at the Pierre Hotel. The Torah has been rented, the stained-glass windows brought in by a lighting-and-design specialist, and Lexi has been working with a private tutor who will also lead her service. Even the prayer books are being made from scratch. "At our synagogue we would have had to share her service, and our family wasn't going to be able to participate in any way," said Melissa Rosenbloom, Lexi's mom. "We wanted a very personal service." Welcome to the DIY bat mitzvah. For decades, bar and bat mitzvahs have not only taken place in synagogues, but also have been the most important tool in temples' efforts to attract members. In order to have the ceremony, families needed to spend thousands of dollars to join a synagogue and enroll their children in religious school starting in third grade. But now, a growing number of families are opting out of what some say has become a factory approach that is unsuited to the time constraints kids have these days. The trend is creating a cottage industry of businesses and professionals offering everything needed for the big day, from rabbis-for-hire to rented Torahs. "For a long time, people stayed in Hebrew school because it was the easiest and most direct road to a bar mitzvah," said Joy Levitt, executive director of the Jewish Community Center on the Upper West Side, who has started a new-model Hebrew-school experience called Jewish Journeys, where kids can choose ad hoc classes like Jewish cooking and conversational Hebrew. "Now, especially in cities like New York, there is more access to professionals, and you can even Google how to have a bar mitzvah for your kid."The reasons families choose this route vary. For some, it is the cost. Membership at an established synagogue in the New York area costs more than $3,000 a year, with Hebrew school adding $1,200 or so per child. Most synagogues also require a building fee of about $5,000 to be paid over a number of years. In contrast, in-home tutors and teachers charge about $100 a lesson and roughly $2,000 to lead the bar mitzvah service. Another issue is the time commitment and the value of the hours the kids put in. Most Hebrew schools require kids to go two or three days a week for two hours at a time. Parents complain that often kids just sit there and watch a movie or read the same Bible story numerous times."A lot of these kids today are so overcommitted," said Joel Cohen, one of the heads of Door to Door Tutoring and the teacher and service leader for Lexi Rosenbloom. "On top of hours of homework, they are into something like ice skating, which takes up five days a week. How is Hebrew school going to fit in with that?"