COLLECTED BY
Organization:
Alexa Crawls
Starting in 1996,
Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the
Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
Crawl IA from Alexa Internet. This data is currently not publicly accessible.
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/19961018024300/http://shamash.org:80/lists/scj-faq/HTML/faq/10-11.html
Frequently Asked Questions and Answers on Soc.Culture.Jewish
Section 10. Conversion, Intermarriage, and "Who is a Jew?"
I've heard that Jewish parents consider an intermarried child as "dead". Is this true?
There are many believe that Judaism teaches that the family must consider as dead (and as a result, perform appropriate mourning practices such as sitting "shiva") for a child who marries a non-Jew. However, it is not clear the anyone does this. It is definitely not halacha (Jewish law), nor is it widespread enough to be a custom.
This "legend" arose because, until recently, those who had interfaith marriages often abandoned Judaism, becoming apostate Jews. The custom of sitting shiva for apostates seems to be based on a misunderstanding of a passage in the Or Zarua (13th cent), which stated that Rabbenu Gershom (11th cent) sat shiva for his son, who had become a Christian. My understanding is that Rabbenu Gershom sat shiva when his son died, despite the fact that he had apostasized, not when the son became a Christian. The halakhic discussion of this point, which starts in the Or Zarua, goes back and forth on whether or not we follow that practice, but, there is no suggestion that we should sit shiva when someone leaves Judaism.
© (c) 1993-1995 Daniel P. Faigin <faigin@shamash.org>
Last modified: $Date: 1995/11/12 15:05:35 $ $Revision: 1.2 $