Good luck with your new venture.

Good luck to you.But I do have one question.

There are females who for reasons of their own might lie to a man who is Jewish and tell him that the child is his.  Many people do not marry today.  Or the wife may have strayed. The man may believe her and not get a DNA test (especially if they are married)  and the child is raised as a Jew in the Reform movement.  Frankly, if the child is raised this way and is in all practicality Jewish it would not bother me.  But this could happen--

The child grows up and wants to marry someone who knows his background. is Jewish, and whose Rabbi or someone else important to the birde to be says that in order to marry  the man needs to convert.  He disagrees and says he can prove he is his father's son, and a DNA test is taken-what then?  It is bad enough for someone to find out his father is not his biological Dad but that he really was not born a Jew.

Wouldn't it have been a lot easier if the baby was converted at birth and all questions would never need to be asked?

Laura

[QUOTE=lauramushkat;33340]Good luck to you.But I do have one question.

There are females who for reasons of their own might lie to a man who is Jewish and tell him that the child is his.  Many people do not marry today.  Or the wife may have strayed. The man may believe her and not get a DNA test (especially if they are married)  and the child is raised as a Jew in the Reform movement.  Frankly, if the child is raised this way and is in all practicality Jewish it would not bother me.  But this could happen--

The child grows up and wants to marry someone who knows his background. is Jewish, and whose Rabbi or someone else important to the birde to be says that in order to marry  the man needs to convert.  He disagrees and says he can prove he is his father's son, and a DNA test is taken-what then?  It is bad enough for someone to find out his father is not his biological Dad but that he really was not born a Jew.

Wouldn't it have been a lot easier if the baby was converted at birth and all questions would never need to be asked?

Laura[/QUOTE]

I think what you're referring to is the old canard that matrilineal descent has to do with "proof" rather than upbringing.  This is not the consensus among scholars of the issue and, in fact, Meir Soloveitchek, a relative of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchek, argues that it is actually because of the way mothers will bring up their children that Judaism defines descent matrilineally.

For more on this issue, see the following posting on my private blog:

http://fareastsideminyan.blogspot.com/2 … ruate.html

As for the emotional dilemma you've described, I don't see how it would be worse than finding out the woman you thought was your biological mother in fact was not.  And yes, that does happen.  Heck, it looks as if an entire season of Desperate Housewives is going to revolve around that.

This is one aspect of matrilineality I find particularly hypocritical.  Mothers are the source of Jewishness "because of how they raise their children," but whether a woman actually raises the child to whom she gives birth then has no effect on the child's Jewishness.  A Jewish woman can give birth to a child and leave it as a foundling at the nearest church, and Orthodoxy will insist that that child is a Jew.  But a foundling who is found and raised by a Jewish woman, but never formally converted, is not.

More to the point, I find the entire assumption that mothers raise their children so differently from fathers to be outdated and sexist, and even more reason to do away with matrilineal descent.

J,

I thought you converted because neither your parents was Jewish.

BS"D

I am not aware of any case in halakha where the conversion of children is permissable in any case.  If there is such a case, please let me know because I have been taught that it is not permissable and prior to the age of majority is not even valid.  To the best of my knowledge the closest one can come to such a case is that of  the conversion of an adopted child when they finally reach the age of majority.