A Memorandum Concerning Child Adoption
Across Religions Lines, Background for Discussion of a Policy for
Jewish Religious Bodies and Jewish Community Relations Agencies
Introduction
At a regular meeting of the National Community Relations Advisory
Council on October 17, 1955, discussion was held looking toward
the formulation of a policy for Jewish community relations agencies
on the issue of child adoption across religions lines. There had
been some preliminary discussion of the same question at a meeting
of the Executive Committee held some two years previously. In the
interim, a number of controversies and litigations had arisen out
of adoptions or applications for adoption of children of non-Jewish
parentage by Jewish couples. Several of these cases had assumed
the dimensions of major interreligious conflict, thus dramatically
raising community relations implications. . . .
Cases and Implications
In one noteworthy case, in New York, two children who had been
placed with Jewish adoptive parents in the belief that they were
the natural children of a Jewish mother, years later were returned
by court order to Catholic case and placed with a Catholic institution,
where they still remained after a passage of several years. This
case posed clearly the issue of public policy involved: Must the
child be placed for adoption only in accordance with the religion
of its natural mother? May the mother, according to her desires,
place the child for adoption with adoptive parents of a faith other
than her own? Or must the state heed the demand of the religious
bodies that the child be given only into the custody of persons
who will rear a child in the religion of the natural mother? If
the last of these questions is answered affirmatively, is the state
placed in the position of a policeman to protect the interests of
religious bodies, groups and institutions?
Application of the principle of the supremacy of the religious
consideration go beyond the realm of child adoption. The New York
law stipulates that, wherever practicable, probation officers in
juvenile cases shall be of the same religion as the children to
whose cases they are assigned. Since approximately 50% of the children
on probation in New York City are Catholic, approximately 45% Protestant,
and only some 5% Jewish, the presiding justice has interpreted the
law as permitting the appointment of Jewish probation officers only
the extent of 5% of the total probationary staff. There has likewise
been pressure to secure legislation that would require that the
psychiatrist assigned to the case of a child should be of the same
religion as the child.
The Welfare Department of the City of New York, feeling itself
bound by the state law requiring that children be given in adoption
only to adoptive parents of the same religion as the natural parents,
sometimes maintains children in public hospitals, where they are
born, or in shelters for years because no institutions of the proper
religion are available to which the child can be referred. After
much agitation over this situation, a public foster home division
of the Department of Welfare for the care of such children has been
created. But, an unwritten agreement provides that no Catholic children
are to be referred to this public agency, but only to Catholic institutions.
(This is in deference to the position of the Catholic Church, Judge
Polier said, that the retention of a child within the religion of
his parents must take precedence over any merely temporal considerations
of health, welfare, adjustment, etc.; and that even if the church
is not in a position to afford the child those conditions for his
well being that might be available under other auspices, the child
must be placed in the custody of the church or a church institution.)
|