Once a Janitor, Now the Bar Mitzvah Photography King of Montreal

[Celerity]

With a touch of chutzpah and “a little help from God,” Braulio Rocha, a Roman Catholic Portuguese immigrant, traded in his mop for a camera.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/31/world/canada/montreal-bar-mitzvah-photographer.html



MONTREAL — Braulio Rocha, a Portuguese janitor at a Montreal synagogue, was about to begin his daily floor mopping routine some years ago when he heard a frantic voice: The photographer assigned to shoot a bris, a ritual circumcision, hadn’t shown up, and the baby’s grandmother was panicking.

Mr. Rocha, an amateur photographer, had recently arrived in Canada from Madeira with $50 in savings and a beat-up old Canon camera that he always carried with him in his car. Wearing his gray and blue polyester janitor’s uniform, a long key ring dangling from his pocket, he recalls, he summoned up the courage and asked the forlorn grandmother if he could shoot the baby’s bris — for free. She agreed, and a new career was born. Brisses soon led to bar mitzvahs, and six years later, Mr. Rocha, a 45-year-old Roman Catholic, has been called the bar mitzvah photography king of Montreal by rabbis and clients alike.

Mr. Rocha, who had never met a Jew before setting foot in Montreal’s Shaar Hashomayim synagogue in 2015, is now so in demand that he sometimes shoots five bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies a week, is booked for bar mitzvahs into 2023, and employs a team of eight assistant photographers. He recently expanded into Hasidic weddings.

He has also traded in his antiquated Canon for a $3,200 model, bought a Volvo SUV, and moved from his cramped apartment into a four-bedroom house in the suburbs, filled with Armani clothing. “I remember thinking, ‘You’re just a janitor,’” he said on a recent day, recalling his big bris break as he sat in the pews of the synagogue’s imposing sanctuary. “But I said to myself, ‘It’s now or never.’ I guess you could say I’m the Canadian dream.”

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