An organization of Modern Orthodox rabbis that performs alternative religious wedding ceremonies for non-religious couples can continue to register the couples.

The Tzohar organization can register the married couples in the community of Shoham, where the head of the organization serves as chief rabbi, while a new bill proposed to loosen restrictions on where marriages can be registered works its way through the system, the organization said Thursday.

Weddings currently must be registered with the municipal rabbinate where one member of the couple lives. Tzohar had been registering couples with one of two municipal rabbinates headed by members of the organization, in Shoham and Gush Etzion, in contravention of the law. Under Thursday's agreement, the organization can continue to register the couples.

A Jewish couple must have a religious ceremony in Israel in order to be recognized as married. Many travel abroad to marry in secular ceremonies.

Labels: Israel, Judaism, Marriage, Orthodox Judaism, religion

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In October 2007 a son was born to Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, and Larisa Trembovler, the divorcée and mother of four whom he had married by proxy while behind bars. The birth followed a series of controversial conjugal visits at the Ayalon Prison, where Amir was then incarcerated. These were in turn preceded by a lengthy court battle involving, at various times, the Israel Prison Service, the internal security service known as Shin Bet, various members of the Knesset, and the Amirs. ...

In the end, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled for Amir, determining that, like all prisoners, he was entitled to certain basic human rights, including the right to bring children into the world and to have a family. ...

In the pre-state period of the Yishuv, or Jewish community in British Mandatory Palestine, a Committee on Birthrate Problems was attached to the National Committee. It called upon David Ben-Gurion, later Israel’s first prime minister, to use both his moral and financial influence to increase the Jewish birthrate. It also asked for the establishment of a “childbirth regime” as “a cornerstone of our Zionist policy and as one of the main functions of our social and local offices; not less important than recruitment to the army, spreading the Hebrew language, purchasing land or maintaining the right for immigration.”

After the establishment of the state in May 1948, in an attempt to encourage an increase in the birth rate, Ben-Gurion introduced a birth prize awarding 100 lira, then the Israeli currency, and a signed letter to every woman on the birth of her 10th child. Though the amount itself was largely symbolic, the program received significant media attention and even became the subject of a popular dictum: “In honor of the motherland/ Ten boys to be born/ With grandeur we receive/ Ben-Gurion’s prize.”

In 1967 the Israeli demographic center was established to act systematically to realize a state policy directed at raising the Jewish birth rate. In 1968 the Fund for Encouraging Fertility was set up to offer subsidized housing loans for families with three or more children and in which one member had served in the Israel Defense Forces. The 1970 Veteran’s Child Allowance Scheme similarly provided child allowances to large families in which at least one member had served in the IDF or another national security service. Given that Jews are required to do military service—and Arabs exempt from it— some have argued these policies had a de facto discriminatory effect, supporting and encouraging an increase in specifically Jewish fertility.

Today, there are more fertility clinics per capita in Israel than in any other country in the world. Every Israeli, regardless of religion or marital status, is entitled to unlimited rounds of in-vitro fertilization treatment free of charge up to the birth of two live children (or even three, under some health insurance policies). In 1996 Israel passed the Embryo Carrying Agreements Law, making Israel the first country in the world to legalize surrogate mother agreements. According to a 2006 paper prepared for the Knesset, 1,800 IVF treatment cycles are performed each year per million people in Israel, compared to 240 in the United States. A 2010 article in Haaretz stated that Israel performs the highest ratio of fertility treatments among developed Western nations.

Labels: abortion, Artificial Reproductive Technology, contraception, demographics, Israel, IVF, natalism

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In an Israeli laboratory, Shani Gelstein is harvesting a woman’s tears. The volunteer is watching the end of the boxing film The Champ. As she weeps, she holds a vial under her eyes to capture the fresh drops. This might seem ghoulish, but Gelstein has used the collected tears to understand why people cry during emotional times. She thinks they’re a chemical signal.

Gelstein used several different techniques to show that the smell of a woman’s emotional tears could reduce a man’s sexual arousal. The men never actually saw anyone cry, and they didn’t know about what they were smelling. Even so, their sniffs reduced their testosterone levels and they lowered the activity in parts of their brain involved in sexual desire. ...

In fact, Vingerhoets thinks that the smell of tears could also make men less aggressive, which would fit with their falling testosterone levels. Their reduced sexual arousal could just be a side effect. Sobel also says, “I expect that the signal in tears will also lower aggression (as it lowered testosterone). Lowering aggression in the person you are interacting with is an obvious interest.” The field is clearly open for debate.

Labels: Israel, men, sex, women

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"What's the book about?"

It was a question I heard frequently over the holidays this past December, as I went to pre-Christmas rehearsals, parties, and church services carrying Tsipy Ivry's Embodying Culture: Pregnancy in Japan and Israel.

"It's about pregnancy," I'd say. "In Japan and Israel."
The inevitable response: "Why there?"

The gestation of Embodying Culture began when anthropologist Tsipy Ivry was concluding a research program as a graduate student in Tokyo, and became pregnant. A native Israeli, Ivry was surprised by what she describes as "an overwhelming and all-encompassing sense of becoming 'different,'" a sensation she attributes not only to the experience of pregnancy itself but also to the reality of being pregnant as an Israeli woman in Japan. This impression in turn led to a developing interest in the lived experience of pregnancy and how it is socially and culturally constructed in different societies. ...

Although both Israeli and Japanese women experience pregnancy as a highly medicalized event, much as in the United States, the forms that medicalization take differ greatly. And these differences, Ivry argues, are deeply rooted in distinctive cultural contexts: in Israel, a struggle to stay alive amidst constant military conflict; in Japan, an emphasis on the betterment of society through the long-term maternal efforts of child-raising.

If we think of each culture's implicit understanding of pregnancy as a narrative, Ivry contends, we'll find that the "protagonist" of the Japanese narrative differs sharply from the protagonist of the Israeli narrative:

In the Japanese arena the protagonist of pregnancy is the interconnected entity of the mother-baby, whereas in the Israeli case the protagonists are the pregnant woman and her suspect fetus. Pregnancy is conceptualized as an early stage of parenting in Japan and is all about the interdependence of mother and baby and their ongoing relationships. The Israeli model defines pregnancy as a state "in limbo" that involves two separate individuals (of whom only one is a person).

Labels: abortion, culture, Israel, Japan, Judaism, motherhood, pregnancy

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Whenever demography is the subject a panicky headline usually follows. Generally these take the form of anxieties about overpopulation. “Are there just too many people in the world?” asks Johann Hari in the Independent. “The World’s population is still exploding,” confirms the Optimum Population Trust (patron David Attenborough). Though equally they could be about the opposite. “Is Europe Dying?” queries Catholic apologist George Weigel (before answering his own question: “The brute fact is that Europe is depopulating itself”). “Falling birth rate is killing Europe says Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks” is the Guardian’s offering. To these hysterical headlines let’s add another, especially for you secular folk: with birth rates of seven babies per women fundamentalists will take over the world. And here is the kicker: it’s all secularism’s fault.

Cover image by Martin RowsonThis grim prognostication comes courtesy of political scientist Eric Kaufmann, a reader in politics at London’s Birkbeck College, and the author of the new book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, out in March from Profile Books. If, like me, you skip the six dense chapters of politico-demographic analysis, in the very last line of the book you can find his answer: “The religious shall inherit the earth.” There is, of course, an “unless” and we’ll get to that later, but let’s just let the idea sink in first.

What Kaufmann is arguing is that the secularisation thesis, the assumption that modernity leads inexorably to a lessening of religious belief and a day when we are all rational humanists, is wrong – at one point Kaufmann approvingly quotes Rodney Stark and Roger Finke’s view that this is “a failed prophecy”. Further he is saying that there is something about our current form of liberal secularism that contains (here’s another headline) the seeds of its own destruction. Since the birth rate of individualistic secular people the world over is way below replacement level (2.1 in the West), and the birth rate of religious fundamentalists is way above (between 5 and 7.5 depending on sect), then through the sheer force of demography religious fundamentalism is going to become a much bigger force in the world and gain considerable political muscle. Literalist religious conservatism is being reborn and we secular liberals are the midwives.

So there’s the challenge.

Labels: Amish/Mennonites, culture, demographics, Europe, Israel, Judaism, religion

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A petition by a male, homosexual married couple to engage a surrogate mother in Israel raises profound social, philosophical and ethical issues and should therefore be decided by the Knesset and not the court, the state told the High Court of Justice late last week.

Because the state recognizes that there have been sweeping changes in the concept of what constitutes a “natural family” and because of the many technological innovations that have been made, it has decided to establish a public, professional committee to study the entire issue of fertility and birth and will include the issue of surrogate mothers in its investigation, the state added.

The response came in the wake of a petition filed on February 10 by Itai Pinkas and Yoav Arad, who married in Canada and for the past five years have been trying other ways to produce a baby they could raise. The two are represented by attorney Dori Spivak, deputy head of the Human Rights Program at Tel Aviv University.

The Surrogacy Law makes it clear that only a couple composed of a man and a woman are allowed to make use of a surrogate mother. But Spivak argued that the law should either be interpreted to include a homosexual pair in the definition of “a couple,” or that, because the current law violates the constitutional right to equality, the right of homosexual couples to engage surrogate mothers should be read into it.

Labels: discrimination law, donor conception, family structure, gay parenting, Israel, surrogate motherhood

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A bill that allows civil marriage in Israel to couples who could not be married by the rabbinate failed by a large margin in its initial reading.

The Civil Union bill, introduced Wednesday by the Kadima Party's Meir Sheetrit, was defeated 58-22. One-third of the Kadima lawmakers did not participate in the vote, the Jerusalem Post reported.

The bill allows a civil marriage where at least one member of a couple is not recognized as Jewish. It creates a marriage registrar in the Justice Ministry authorized to legalize civil marriages for those who are not eligible to marry by current law as well as divorces.

The bill does not contravene Jewish law since it does not allow civil marriages for those who may marry by Jewish law, according to Sheetrit's office.

Labels: Israel, Judaism, Marriage, religion

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