Stigma over Jews who are born out of wedlock is unfair
THEIR PAIN is largely hidden from the Jewish community, their voices seldom heard.
But the “veil of silence” over mamzerim — children of an adulterous or incestuous union — was lifted for one Limmud session by a researcher who is exploring the impact of the status on the lives of those affected by it.
Emma Rozenberg, who has practised as a family and government lawyer and is now half-way through a doctorate at King’s College, said that mamzerut was “rarely discussed” in the UK “other than a side issue to the agunah problem” but deserved attention “in its own right”.
‘Adultery’ in Jewish law is defined as a relationship between a married Jewish woman and a Jewish man other than her husband. A mamzer may marry only a fellow-mamzer or a convert, but the stigma is hereditary: the child of a mamzer is a mamzer.
While non-Orthodox movements have effectively abolished the category, it remains applicable within the Orthodox community.
The impact could be “profound”,
Ms Rozenberg said. “People I spoke to talked a lot about living with a sense of shame, feeling that they were living with a secret.” Some were “leading a traditional Jewish life within an Orthodox community… and grappling with what it means to beam amzerint hat context ”.
Others had “found their place quite comfortably… along the Jewish spectrum where mamzerut is no longer recognised”.
But some young people felt “so angered and hurt by the way their family had been treated that they wanted to marry someone who wasn’t Jewish and leave the Jewish community”.
Some parents were “very angry in seeing their children in so much pain and feeling that their children had been rejected”.
Some remaining in the Orthodox world lived with a “fear of exposure,” she said. “One woman described to me her fear of her children being thrown out of their Jewish school if their mamzer status ever become known.
“This veil of silence over the issue of mamzerut is perhaps something my research can start to address,” she said.