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This Week
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•
Experts defend the parenting skills ofisraers Orthodox community.
the most Orthodox — who make up roughly
400,000 of Israel's nearly 5 million Jews — than
among non-Orthodox Israeli families. The common
stereotype of Orthodox parents treating their chil-
dren as an undifferentiated brood, occasionally los-
ing track of one or two of them, and doing all they
can just to keep the kids fed and dressed, Dr.
Kadman said, is "complete nonsense."
LARRY DERFNER
Israel Correspondent
Iiir
Jerusalem
hen Justice Minister Yossi Beilin said
that large families have a hard time
giving children the attention they
need, Israel's Orthodox community
was predictably outraged.
"Antisemite" was one of the epithets directed at
Beilin.
But Israel's most prominent advocate for chil-
dren's well-being, Dr. Yitzhak Kadman, says Beilin's
comments were not necessarily outrageous, and cer-
tainly not antisemitic — they were just wrong.
Orthodox Israeli children in general get at least as
good an upbringing as do mainstream Israeli kids,
said Dr. Kadman, executive director of Israel's
National Council for the Child.
- This, he said, despite the large size of many
Orthodox families — the average is 7 1/2 children —
and their frequent poverty. "The amount of thought
and attention parents give to their children is not
automatically a function of the number of children
in the family," said Dr. Kadman.
He's found no more cases of child neglect among
Doing A Good Job
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Prof. Menachem Friedman, one of Israel's leading
authorities on Orthodox society, said these par-
ents, on the whole, actually "excel" at bringing up
children.
"It's not because they're better people, but because
they believe the individual must do what's best for
the community, and their community places great
emphasis on children," said Friedman, a sociologist
at Bar-Ilan University.
Dr. 'Cadman and Friedman were reacting to
Beilin's comments in the Hdaretz daily earlier- this
month, in which the justice minister suggested that
impoverished families cannot provide proper atten-
tion and education to "15 and 17 children."
Beilin also objected to using the polite term
"blessed" when referring to families with an unusu-
ally large number of kids. "If all of the children are
neglected, is this still a blessing?" he asked.
Knesset Member Tommy Lapid, whom the
Orthodox see as Public Enemy No. 1, seconded
Beilin's remarks, saying children of huge families are
unlikely to grow up to be useful members of society.
He congratulated Beilin for stating, in his view,
what many Israeli leaders think but don't have the
courage to say.
These remarks caused outrage in the haredi (fer-
vently Orthodox) community and, to a lesser
extent, in right-wing Orthodox circles. Callers to
religious radio stations accused Beilin of "hating the
Jewish people."
Knesset Member Zvi Hendel said Beilin's remarks
reflected "the sickness of the extreme left-wing."
In the Knesset, Cabinet Minister Eli Yishai,
leader of the powerful Shas (Sephardi Orthodox)
party, said it was "inconceivable that an Israeli
government minister could say such a thing after
a third of the Jewish people was wiped out in the
Holocaust."
Aid An Issue
Beilin made his statements while discussing his
opposition to a Knesset bill that would increase state
aid to families with four or more children. This aid
already is the staple of Orthodox economic solvency,
since most hared_i men do not work but rather study
in yeshivas and live off government stipends.
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An Orthodox woman walks with her child
in the Kfar Darom settlement in the
•
Haredi women are beginning to enter the work-
force, notably in teaching and computers, but the
great majority still have their hands full tending to
their households.
In Kiryat Sefer, a religious West Bank settlement,
a yeshiva student of about 30 who has four children,
and who wants "as many more as God will give us,"
described haredi family life as blissful.
"The more children there are, the easier it gets.
We don't raise them, the Blessed Holy One raises
them. You can't imagine how wonderful it is.
Someone who doesn't believe in the Blessed Holy
One can't understand it," said the man, who
declined to give his name.
While deriding negative stereotypes about
Orthodox child-rearing, Dr. Kadman stressed, "The
positive stereotype presented by the haredim, that
life with 12 children is nonstop joy and laughter, is
also quite an overstatement."
One of the problems in large families, he said, is
that a child who needs extra parental attention
because of an emotional or mental difficulty "can
easily get lost in the shuffle."
Another is that economic strains can make it
impossible to keep so many kids in new clothes,
although Dr. Kadman noted 'that children don't nec-
essarily feel slighted by this.
"In haredi families, the older children, especially
the teen-age daughters, help out in taking care of
the younger kids. From the family's point of view,
this is good, because the kids are always looked after.
But it may not be good for the teen-age girl, who is
given so much adult responsibility," he said.
Children Victimized?
In the Ha'aretz interview, Beilin said the principle of
the more children, the better, victimizes not only the
children but the mothers as well, and condemns
them to lives of "slavery and servitude."
Naomi Ragen, an Orthodox Jewish author whose
best-selling novels portray Orthodox women in con-
flict with a dogmatic community, said, "I agree with
[Beilin] 100 percent."
She said the mandate for women to have "as
many children as their bodies can provide" is driving
some Orthodox mothers to nervous breakdowns
and, albeit in the rarest of incidents, to suicide.
While noting the many "remarkable and
admirable" mothers who manage to keep their
numerous children looking and behaving well,