In a letter to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency today, Prof. Moshe Davis of the Hebrew University’s Institute of Contemporary Jewry, clarified his remarks on intermarriage made at a seminar session of the B’nai B’rith’s Board of Governors meeting in Tel Aviv and reported in the March 14 JTA Daily News Bulletin.
Prof. Davis said his views on the subject originally appeared in the Dec. 1968 issue of the Jewish Journal of Sociology. “In that study, I differentiate between intermarriage and mixed marriage,” he told the JTA. “In the former, namely intermarriage, one of the partners adopts the faith of the other before marriage in the attempt to achieve a religious unity in the family. This is not so in the case of mixed marriage in which both partners continue in their respective faiths and do not regard their religious differences as a basic obstacle to the totality of their marriage aspirations.”
Prof. Davis noted that his remark that Jewish family life can be maintained and perpetuated even in mixed families “refers only to those cases where religion and family unity prevails.”
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