­Why do Orthodox families have so many children?

Family size has increased in the religious community. VIVA HAMMER  interviewed dozens of mothers to find out what is driving the baby boom.

There’s a story from Jerusalem about a man getting on a bus. He is followed by eight children. The driver, who is behind schedule, shouts at the man, “Why didn’t you leave half of them at home?!” The man seats his children, pays for their tickets, and answers, “I did.” 

In the past 50 years, large families have become the emblem of Orthodox Jews. If a woman wears a wig, we expect she will have at least five children. If a man has eight children, his shirt will be white and his yarmulka large. The number of children a couple has is a public display of their piety. Leah, an ultra-Orthodox mother of 11, describes walking into a yeshiva banquet knowing that, “Yes! I am just as haredi as the rest of them”. No one questions her religious credentials if she has 11 children. Religious Jewish women today have “baby after baby, like page after page of Gemara (books of Jewish law),” says one mother of five from Sydney. Quantity counts.

It hasn’t always been so. After World War II, America and Australia were booming with babies, but religious Jewish families were smaller than national averages. Religious Jews were more likely to be immigrants, Holocaust survivors, and poor. They were, apparently, carefully controlling their births, perhaps to avoid the fall into penury and giving their children a chance to move into the middle class.

The post-war baby boom ended in the mid-1960s. It was followed by a decline in births that has spread – to a greater or lesser extent – globally. Today, only one developed country has enough children to replace its adults: Israel. Even India, famous for its fecundity, is delivering just two children per woman. China, Japan and South Korea are producing so few children that they are facing rapid depopulation.

In light of the global fertility decline, the growth in Orthodox birthrates in the past 50 years is a conundrum. When the world was booming with babies, religious Jewish couples were having small families, and as the world embarked on a baby bust, religious couples began baby booming. What is behind this contrarian movement?

This question is not just academic for me. After my second child was born, I caught an image in the news of a man fleeing across a border with a child in his arms. Quickly I calculated: if I strapped my toddler at back, and the baby on front, I could make a dash. Not for long. And not with more than two. I was Orthodox. I wore a wig. And I had two children, a girl and a boy, as Jewish law required of their father. I was done.

Running across borders with babies was not a fanciful concern for me. My father had survived fascism and Nazism and escaped communism by running. If you were quick and the babies were silent, you might make it out alive.

The girls I grew up with in Sydney, all children of survivors, didn’t think like me. They had one or two siblings, as I did, but they became mothers of large broods. I was astonished. How did they plan to run across borders with them all? So, I went to ask these mothers why they were having so many babies and I have continued asking these questions of mothers all over the world for 20 years.

Carol, a modern orthodox mother of six, told me her that her neighbours and her children, “are choosing to have larger families.” They’re not having children because Jewish law prohibits birth control. Jewish law has discussed birth control openly from the earliest sources and as a result in modern times, “as soon as Jews figured out birth control, they used it.” Carol laments that, “My kids act like Catholics [in rejecting birth control]. It drives me nuts but that’s also a choice, a true choice.”

Most of the mothers I spoke to had used contraceptives. Some asked rabbis before they did so early in their marriages. After a few children, and talking to rabbis a few times, the women learned the parameters of the law and started making their own contraceptive decisions.  

Ora began her marriage in an ultra-Orthodox town in Israel and had six children in quick succession. Initially she didn’t ask a rabbi about contraceptives because, “I felt the stigma: what kind of a person asks that kind of heter (permission), to grovel that my life is falling apart?” After her sixth child a rabbi allowed her to use birth control for six months which “wasn't relevant, I never got pregnant that fast anyway.” After that, Ora’s attitude changed. She decided, “I didn't need to ask [about contraceptives]; I did it myself. Then I had kids two and a half years apart and that was much more relaxed. I was ready for it. I needed to feel I had the choice.”

Ora had several more children after taking contraceptives into her own hands, even though her rabbi said there was no reason to have more children if she or her husband didn’t feel good about it. ”The decision to have more kids is not a religious one. In the last three years I have shifted, have come to see every child is a unique blessing. I don't like the idea of a woman being a child bearer, but rather, a child raiser. Physically having kids isn't the most important thing; raising them well is.”

I am a child of a Holocaust survivor and couldn’t imagine having more than two children - precisely because of what happened to children in the war, and to mothers, and to all Jews. But the women I interviewed learned a different message from the war. Carol, the modern orthodox mother of six, was born in America in the 1940s. “We were surrounded by people who wanted to have as many as they could, as a religious ethic, to replace the victims of the Holocaust. It was part of the environment, but I can’t tell that I ever heard anybody say: 'It’s your duty to have as many as you can or replace the ones that were lost.' It was there but I didn’t feel it. It must have been a subliminal message.”

Women are also driven by a desire to replace Jews lost to assimilation. Kim, a mother of five, is from a Jewish family in England for hundreds of years. All family members of her generation are married out. “I just feel propelled to maintain, to continue the Jewish heritage. We’re the only family with Jewish children,” she says.  

“It doesn’t mean I have to have loads and loads of kids but it definitely means that bringing up a solidly identifying Jewish family is really important to me. It’s constantly there when I think of my grandparents and who are their grandchildren, and they’re all beautiful grandchildren, don’t misunderstand me in any way. But in terms of Jewish heritage, I kind of feel propelled, and a kind of responsibility actually: straight, plodding along, just keeping on going, keeping on.”

The big question is whether the Orthodox baby boom will continue. In Israel, religious family sizes have been shrinking. It’s likely that the trend is in the same direction in the Diaspora, although that is harder to measure precisely. The drive to replace the war losses declines as time passes, and the financial and emotional investment parents expect to invest in each child keeps increasing.

“Each child is another pair of shoes to tie,” a Hasidic woman told me. And each needs a seat on the bus and readiness for a world in which their competitors will mostly be only children into whom their parents have invested everything.

Photo: From in the television show Shtisel, ultra-orthodox mother Giti, played by Neta Riskin, with her five children.