­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.