"A hyphenated last name for women undermines family values," head of the Zomet institute Rabbi Yisrael Rozen writes in an article to be published in the Shabbat Beshabbato leaflet this weekend.
In his article, Rozen maintains that the custom of preserving the woman’s maiden name alongside the husband’s name creates "a slippery slope" that could lead to giving different surnames to the children in the family.
"I don’t consider myself a full-fledged conservative, but I completely object to feminism when it hurts family values, and it does!" Rozen states.
"It is clear to me that a hyphenated name for married woman is just the beginning of the process. There are already women who keep their maiden mane alone, as if saying, ‘Marriage is only a secondary aspect of life,’ ‘Who needs to know that I’m married,’ and ‘This is an invasion of privacy.’"
This ideology, says the rabbi, "Is wrapped up in nice words to appear as egalitarianism and a preservation of personal identity."
Rozen claims that he sympathizes with women’s desire to preserve a link to their familial heritage, and the need of career women to maintain their reputation, but adds that the trend is founded on "a feminist message which strays from the patriarchal tradition and makes a statement that women are not the husband’s property."
Specfically it made we realize that according to halacha, there is NO Mr. and Mrs., and a married woman is NEVER known by her husband’s name. She is named Plonit bat Ploni (her father) in schul when they take the Torah out, and she keeps exacty that name her entire life.
The only halachic indications a Jewish women is married are: 1. She has a kosher ketubah with her and her husband’s name on it. 2. She covers her head in public and observes other modes of tznius conduct reserved for married women. And that’s pretty much it.
Of course there’s "dina malchuta dina", the law of the kingdom is the law. In civil matters, which marriage certainly is. Still, this business of Jewish women being known as Mrs. is a very recent development.
I wonder if the reason a lot of Jewish women are staying single is because they subconsciously don’t want to be a Mrs.?
Cindy responds: "I would venture a guess that most frum women are probably not hyphenating or keeping their birth names (at least not the ones that I know), and the rest of us couldn’t care less about R’ Rozen’s opinion on the subject, so I can’t help but wonder who is his target audience. Although I must admit, I would be most interested in hearing him explain exactly how my family has been "harmed" by my keeping my name and which of the "family values" I have "shattered.""
Micha Berger posts:
My bar mitzvah parashah is Pinechas. The parashah posed two distinct challenges not found in many other parshios. The second one, in textual order, is that the portion on sacrifices has many verses that are nearly identical. You could have 5 words the same, to the same trop, and then the verses end differently. Since I remember this kind of thing using a sliding window of the recent text to remember the next word, it was a challenge keeping all thse similar but different cases apart. (Not Sukkos; the almost perfectly identical list of mussaf offerings, differing only by a couple of conjugations in the whole list and a decreasing number of cows was easy.)
The first problem is that the second aliyah is a list of family names for each tribe. These are all the founder’s name, a son or grandson of the father of the tribe, almost always conjugated with an "-i" at the end.
And yes, a woman would join her husband’s family in this system. And so, a woman in the Judges period who married a Falu’i became a Falu’i. Sometime between that era and the Babylonian exile (after the First Temple), we lost family identity. Tribal identity, except for most kohanim and leviim, was lost at the end of the First Temple, so perhaps that’s when this was lost as well.
Skip forward a couple of millenia. "Rashi" is short for Rav Shelomo Yitzchaqi, or in English, "Rabbi Solomon Isaacson". Was his father’s name Isaac? If so, why isn’t he called "ben Yitzchaq", like everyone else? It would appear to be a family name, as in the "-i" suffix in the Torah — "Isaacson" rather than "Isaac’s son".
Much later in history, our ancestors resisted taking on surnames because it was chukat hagoyim — gentile rites. In some areas, to the point where the gov’t finally imposed meaningless ones on us: Klein (short), Gross (big), Weiss (white), Schwartz (black), Blau (blue), Gruen (Green), Roth (Red), etc… There are stories where the congregation was taken to shul and divided into four, one group in each corner. Klein, Gross, Weiss, Schwartz (Big, Little, White, Black).
