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But Will the Chicken Soup Taste as Good?
Gentile Mothers Raise Jewish Kids

A couple of months ago, Christina Aguilera snagged tabloid headlines when she hosted a bris for her 8-day-old son, Max Liron Bratman. The Catholic pop star apparently plans to raise her child in the faith of her Jewish husband, whom she married in a Jewish ceremony in 2006.

While Ms. Aguilera may be the most famous example these days, she is hardly the only gentile woman who has, in effect, become a "Jewish mother." Every Friday night, Abi Auer -- an Atlanta mom of two small children -- makes a special dinner for the Jewish Sabbath, often with homemade challah. Kim Stiglitz, who lives in San Francisco, recently began marking the Sabbath by avoiding computer use on Friday nights and reserving Saturdays for family time with her husband, Marc, and 2-year-old daughter, Poppy.

For thousands of years, only children born to a Jewish mother (or who underwent a conversion) were considered members of the tribe. But while Orthodox and Conservative Jews continue to adhere to the law of "matrilineal descent," for the past quarter-century the more liberal Reform movement has fully accepted the children of Jewish fathers and gentile mothers provided that the parents give their offspring a Jewish upbringing.

Today, with intermarriage increasingly pervasive in the American Jewish community, it is no longer unusual to see gentile moms coordinating the Hebrew school carpool and hosting Passover seders. In fact, the Jewish Outreach Institute (JOI) -- a New York-based group seeking to make the Jewish community more welcoming and inclusive -- estimates that there are over 200,000 households in the U.S. in which gentile mothers and Jewish fathers are raising Jewish children.

The Mothers Circle, a national program sponsored by the institute, aims to give these women the know-how and confidence to pull this off. "Even though this is the 21st century, it's still for the most part left to women to make educational decisions for the children and to raise the children," explains Paul Golin, associate executive director of JOI, which has brought the Mothers Circle to 26 synagogues and Jewish community centers across the U.S. since a pilot program opened in Atlanta in 2002.

Participants receive a basic Jewish education with an emphasis on holidays and life-cycle events, like naming ceremonies and bar mitzvahs. (And no, for you fans of Philip Roth and Woody Allen, there are no lessons in guilt trips or overfeeding.) In addition, Mothers Circle serves as a support group for women as they struggle to adjust to unfamiliar traditions and find acceptance as outsiders in a frequently insular community.

"We had assigned someone to bring snacks each week, and then we started assigning someone to bring tissues," says Ms. Stiglitz, who joined a Mothers Circle group this fall. "There is lots of crying. It's very therapeutic." According to Ms. Auer, "It's a group of people you can identify with and have safe conversations with."

While many participants ultimately decide to become Jewish, organizers insist that this is not the goal of the Mothers Circle. Ms. Stiglitz, who was raised with no religion, recently began taking conversion classes. Ms. Auer, a lapsed Catholic, says that she doesn't "foresee ever converting because I don't feel it in my heart." Nonetheless, she says that she is comfortable raising her children in Judaism -- even if it is "a letdown" at times not to share things she fondly remembers from her own childhood, like her church's stained-glass windows or the voices of the choir.

In addition to holding face-to-face meetings, women in the Mothers Circle are encouraged to interact on a national Listserv, where discussions have touched on everything from how to prepare for Passover to feelings about giving up (or not giving up) a Christmas tree. Just under 400 women have participated in Mothers Circle so far, but the number of people affected is much greater, says JOI's Mr. Golin, who notes that each woman "represents at least two additional people: a spouse and at least one child."

Ms. Cohen, who has led Mothers Circle groups since the program's inception, says that she has been impressed by the participants' dedication, although she notes that they are often stymied by "their own husbands, who are often ambivalent about Judaism." Participants frequently report, with a mixture of puzzlement and frustration, that their husbands, though insisting that the children be brought up as Jews (or at least not as Christians), are often reluctant to attend synagogue or participate in Jewish activities. Ms. Stiglitz says that she came home from her first Mothers Circle session "gung ho" about celebrating Shabbat every week, only to have her husband say, "No way."

For Sylvia Barack Fishman, a professor of contemporary Jewish life at Brandeis University and the author of "Double or Nothing: Jewish Families and Mixed Marriage," that's why the Mothers Circle is "a good idea" but inherently limited.

The main problem the Jewish community faces, according to Ms. Fishman, is not that there are so many Christian mothers but that Jewish fathers tend to be so disengaged from Judaism. "Men in general are much more skeptical about the necessity for religion in raising children," says Ms. Fishman. "Women, both Jewish and non-Jewish, are much more likely to say that religion is a useful tool in raising moral and ethical people and that it's better to raise children with religion than not with religion."

Indeed, while Jewish women intermarry as frequently as Jewish men, studies show that interfaith couples in which the Jewish spouse is female are far more likely to bring up their children as Jews. Maybe what's needed next is a Fathers Circle.

Ms. Wiener is a columnist for the Jewish Week.

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