Zeved habat ( - Gift of the Daughter) or Simchat Bat (Hebrew: - Celebration of the Daughter) is the Jewish naming ceremony for newborn girls. The details of the celebration varies somewhat by Jewish community and will typically feature the recitation of specific biblical verses and a prayer to announce the name of the newborn child. The ceremony is also known by other names including Fadas, Brit Bat (Hebrew: - "Covenant of the Daughter") or Brit Kedusha (Hebrew: - "Covenant of Holiness"). A medieval naming ceremony for girls, according to the custom of some medieval Ashkenazi communities, was known as a Hollekreisch (Yiddish: ), or Shabbat Hayoledet ("Sabbath of the Birth Mother"). Background The practice of Zeved Habat is recorded as a custom of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews in various communities including Moroccan Jews, Syrian Jews, the Sephardic community in England and of Cochin Jews of India. The ceremony is listed in a book of prayers published in 1687 associated with the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam. In the mid-20th century, following the development of the Havurah movement and the rise of Jewish feminism, American Jews took a renewed interest in both new and traditional ceremonies for welcoming baby girls. For American Jews who did not previously maintain the tradition of a naming ceremony for newborn girls, one strategy has been to recover older Jewish traditions to meet the present ritual needs of the community. It is likely that the first such ceremony to be formulated for Jews outside of the Sephardi and Mizrahi communities was a ceremony developed by rabbis in Reconstructionist Judaism in the 1970s. However, during in the 1970s and 1980s, other American Jews from various denominations, including individual Orthodox families, also formulated various ceremonies often referred to as a Simchat Bat. At the same time, some Orthodox scholars, including Moshe Meiselman and Judith Bleich, raised opposition to new ceremonies, while Rabbi Shlomo Riskin at the Lincoln Square Synagogue supported the incorporation of the ceremony as Orthodox custom. In the case of Anglo-speaking Orthodox communities, a modified version of the Zeved Habat ceremony has been added to established Orthodox prayerbooks (alongside the standard Ashkenazi mi sheberach) since the early 2000s with the support of UK Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. The traditional ceremony In Jewish legal literature, the Zeved Habat event is cited as either taking place in the synagogue during the Torah reading of the Shabbat service, when