Published: 5 August 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
Parents of slain soldiers are pushing for their right to be grandparents. Critics call it planned orphanhood.
At a Memorial Day gathering in Kiryat Shmona, 20 people, sit around the table in the main room of a public housing apartment to remember German Rozhkov.
Rozhkov, a Ukrainian immigrant turned soldier, was killed 20 years ago, when he was 25.
One of the children darting among the mourners—sitting on laps and nodding shyly—is five-year-old Veronica. She never met Rozhkov, of course, but she is his daughter.
Thirty hours after he was killed, his sperm was extracted, preserved in liquid nitrogen, and, 14 years later, used to fertilize the eggs of Irena Akselrod. She didn’t know Rozhkov, but volunteered to bear and raise his child after meeting Rozhkov’s mother Ludmila.
“I was moved by her story,” Akselrod says. “She’s alone in Israel, she lost her only son, and had no grandchild.”
Persuading a judge to grant Ludmila Rozhkov and Akselrod the right to German’s sperm included testimony about his desire for children. But there was no case law covering when a dead man’s sperm could be used to produce offspring. In his ruling, the family court judge wrote: “When the law doesn’t provide an answer, the court must turn to the principles of Jewish heritage. ‘Give me children, or I shall die,’ our mother Rachel cried out. This logic reflects man’s desire to continue through his offspring the physical and spiritual existence of himself, his family, and people. We are told, ‘Be fruitful and multiply’.”
There are a few dozen children like Veronica and the military practice of postmortem sperm retrieval is now a familiar topic in Israel, even if it’s extremely rare elsewhere.
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Post-mortem sperm retrieval is turning dead men into fathers (Bloomberg)
Photo: Sperm approach an egg (Austin Fertility)
