Intermarriage a Threat to Jewish Way of Life?

It is no big deal to many Americans when people of different religions decide to get married. They’ll throw the rice and drink the champagne and choose to forget that marriages today have about a 50% chance of survival--less if they’re in California.

But, for many Jews, intermarriage is nothing to celebrate, not even in this day and age.

An Ultimate Threat

No matter what the chances of longevity or happiness, intermarriage represents what many Jews consider to be the ultimate threat to their community: the threat of extinction, particularly now, when the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles estimates that between 30% and 40% of marriages by U.S. Jews are to non-Jews.

Or as Rabbi Maurice Lamm, senior rabbi of the orthodox Beth Jacob congregation in Beverly Hills, sees the threat of increasing intermarriage, “It means the destruction of the Jewish people in no uncertain terms.”

The Council on Jewish Life of the Jewish Federation Council of Los Angeles describes the problem in milder but no less concerned language: “The possibility of intermarriage has become a painful reality for so many families and poses very serious concerns for the organized Jewish community. . . . Will the large numbers and the consequences on Jewish identity formation seriously undermine the traditional religious and communal forms of American Jewish life. . . ? Will intermarried couples and their children be ‘lost’ to Judaism or will it be possible for them to maintain a connection?”

And, some of those affiliated with the council are asking, “Will Jews who’ve experienced heartbreak and separation in their families because of intermarriage now find any relief?”

As Martin Apel, who served as first chairman of the council’s Commission on Outreach to Couples With One Jewish Partner, describes the history of the situation, “In our grandparents’ day, if their children married outside the religion, it was a major disaster. Our grandparents were like Tevye in ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ and, if a child married outside the religion, the child was considered dead, cut off from the family. Our parents’ generation reacted to the intermarriage of a child by crying a lot. The current generation is saying, ‘That’s got to stop.’ ”

Three years ago, the commission began looking for solutions to these problems, for answers that are still being refined but are now being discussed publicly.

Controversial Issue

How to deal with intermarriage and its ramifications is a most complex and controversial issue within the Jewish community. A recent position paper of the commission noted that “the sensitive nature of our subject matter is apparent to us. There are those who would counsel that we leave ‘well enough’--or ‘bad enough’--alone; that we offer no comfort or companionship from the Jewish community to those Jews who have opted for a non-Jewish spouse. They read that act as Jewish self-alienation, a conscious removal from our people.

“We believe, and experience confirms, that conclusion to be false, time and again. Some of our children who marry ‘out of the faith’ love their Judaism and our people. They wish to find acceptance in their families and in the Jewish community.”

To that end, the commission has attempted to turn threat into opportunity. It has worked with local synagogues and community agencies to establish programs specifically aimed at bringing intermarried Jews back into the Jewish community or helping them to maintain such connections. The commission has also encouraged other programs that deal with introducing Judaism to non-Jews and still others of a self-help variety that teach parents of intermarried children how to cope with their feelings of loss and betrayal.

According to Egon Mayer, a noted expert on Jewish intermarriage and a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, these results in the Los Angeles area have been “absolutely pioneering.”

Outreach in Los Angeles

“It’s happening in a lesser extent in other places, but I don’t think there’s any other community that’s gone as far as the Los Angeles community in this area,” Mayer said during a recent visit to Los Angeles to speak on a forum probing areas of agreement and disagreement on what has become known as “outreach.”

Also present for the forum, held at the Jewish Federation Council’s offices, were Lydia Kukoff, the national director of the Commission on Reform Jewish Outreach, and Rabbi Lamm, considered by some to be the “dean” of the orthodox movement in Southern California.

While both Mayer and Kukoff spoke enthusiastically in favor of outreach programs, Lamm indicated that he preferred limited forms of outreach, specifically “outreach to educate, not outreach to embrace.”

“If we’re worried about Jewish survival, I don’t know if we should be reaching out to the intermarried,” he said, adding that he feared that a “willy-nilly” attitude of outreach could be interpreted as giving people an opportunity to say, “OK, I’ll intermarry and let them reach out to me.”

Punishment Opposed

Lamm added that in no way did he feel people who intermarry should be punished (“Who are we to punish?”), but that outreach should be undertaken to reach converts and to educate the entire Jewish community on the dangers of intermarriage. Lamm further objected to publicizing outreach programs because he felt that such publicity tends to send the message of validating intermarriage.

(Later, Lois Guenther, the current chairperson of the Commission on Outreach to Couples With One Jewish Partner, would explain that “the reason we’re so committed to publicity is we can’t reach people other ways to let them know that we have programs for them.”)

Sociologist Mayer, who described himself as less concerned with what messages are given off than with the reality of what the Jewish community should do about all the intermarried families already in existence, discussed the ambivalence and assimilation problems faced by most Jews: “Do I become like everybody else or do I become different? Am I Jewish enough? Am I too Jewish?”

Sociotherapy

“The first task of outreach is really a kind of psychotherapy or sociotherapy,” he said. “It’s to help people become aware of how they’ve constructed their identities. Then comes the Jewish component: Where does Jewishness fit in the making of the identity. For most people, both Jews and non-Jews, the religious-ethnic component of their identity is not necessarily the master set around which everything else spins.”

Mayer, who endorses both outreach programs and the publicizing of them, went on to say that he is “very much in favor of letting couples know that the Jewish community has not closed its doors to them.” However, he likened his position to that of tobacco companies, which must include a warning on their packaging that the surgeon general has determined that cigarette smoking is hazardous to one’s health. “We need to put a warning on the label that the community in no way endorses intermarriage.”

Kukoff made it clear that she favors both educating and embracing Jews who have intermarried and their spouses.

“I believe we have to be prepared to meet people where they are,” she said. “We have to educate people. But I don’t know how to reach them to educate them if we don’t bring them in our midst. We don’t condone interfaith marriage. We don’t stand for the statement, ‘Go out. Do whatever you want. We have a program for it.’

A Part of the Community

“I, as a parent, wish I had ‘Don’t do it’ power over my kids,” she continued. “Do we say to them, ‘You’ve done something terrible. You’re out. Stay out there. Or do we bring them in the door? . . . We have to help them become part of our community so they’re at least in our midst.”

That many young Jewish couples who intermarry do, in fact, feel cut off from the community was evident in remarks made by Rabbi Paul Dubin, the executive vice president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, an organization of about 200 rabbis.

“The Board of Rabbis gets calls constantly asking, ‘Do you know where we can get a rabbi who will intermarry people?’ ” he said, adding that when the callers are told, “No,” those providing that information “get abusive language saying that ‘you are pushing me away.’ ” As for just how rabbis are lining up on the issue of outreach, Dubin first indicated that he “would imagine that most orthodox rabbis agree with Lamm and perhaps some of the conservative rabbis, too.” But then he thought about it and observed that he wasn’t really sure where the rabbis stood right now, or in what numbers, or if their views were divided along the expected lines of the orthodox, conservative and reform divisions of the Jewish religion.

Finally, he said, “You could say there’s a variety of opinions in agreement or disagreement.”