Support for Mr. and Mrs. Melvin B. Ellis in their fight to keep their foster daughter Hildy in the face of a court order to surrender the child because her natural mother is a Catholic and her foster parents are Jewish came today from two Protestant sources.
While the Ellises continue to hide from a warrant and their attorney continues his legal move, the New England annual conference of the Met hodist Church condemned the Massachusetts law under which adoptions may be denied and foster families broken up. “Particularly do we protest,” said the Methodist conference, “against the policy of uprooting a child already secure in a foster home because of a difference in religious background between his foster parents and his natural parents.”
The Christian Science Monitor, respected national newspaper published by the Christian Science Church, declared editorially: “Some revision seems needed in a law that can wrench a four-year-old child from the only parents it has ever known. Any legal system structured to permit a case to run on for years while ties of child to adoptive parents constantly strengthen, violates both reason and feeling, and is open to severe censure.”
(In New York today a case somewhat similar to that of the Ellises was revealed with the filing of a suit to halt the adoption of a five-month boy by Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Gluckman. The child’s unwed mother, of the Greek Orthodox faith and a resident of Chicago, charges that she did not know when she agreed to his adoption that the Gluckmans were Jewish. The foster father says that the entire matter was thoroughly discussed with the mother. The suit was filed barely a week before the adoption became final.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
