Breast-Feeding Kosher In Synagogue

To the truly religious, the Torah is like mother's milk-sustaining and nurturing.

Many, however, don't believe the sanctuary is a place where mothers and their babies should extend that metaphor into breast-feeding. In their view, the only thing that should be uncovered during services is the Torah scroll.

But a new religious opinion passed recently by the Conservative movement's law committee endorses the idea of women discreetly breast-feeding their children in the sanctuary.

"I understand halacha to permit public breast-feeding, including in a beit midrash or synagogue sanctuary during a worship service, so long as it is done in a modest, subtle and dignified fashion," according to the paper written by Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson.

"This paper is important particularly as the Conservative movement gears up to show its attractiveness to younger people and to bringing women on board as equal players," Rabbi Artson, dean of the rabbinical school at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles and the father of young children, told The Jewish Week. "Including in synagogue life the family raising that so many women are intimately involved with is essential," as is "making the decorum of our synagogues less of an inflexible priority."

The matter of mothers breast-feeding in public-still a taboo in some quarters despite a popular culture that worships displays of midriff and other flesh-resurfaced as a national issue recently courtesy of talk-show host Barbara Walters.

In May, on her show "The View," the 70-something Walters expressed distaste at having seen a woman nursing her baby on a plane.

In less time than it takes to get junior into suckling position, some 200 women converged on the television studio to protest, holding babies and placards.

Synagogue sanctuaries are hardly immune from social challenges. Some Orthodox congregations recently began banning most alcohol consumption; one Orthodox synagogue on Long Island has prohibited talking during religious services.

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