When Joan Hawxhurst, a Methodist, married Steven Bertman, who is Jewish, nearly six years ago, she searched the library near their Boulder, Colo., home for resources for interfaith couples.
Hawxhurst didn’t find much, but has since developed two programs of her own to rectify that situation.
“We had joined a support group in Denver and had a wealth of material from the Jewish community. What I didn’t have was something that made me feel whatever we did was valid,” recalled Hawxhurst, who now lives in Kalamazoo, Mich., with her husband, a chemistry professor at Western Michigan University.
In 1992, with her husband’s encouragement, Hawxhurst, a freelance writer and editor, created Dovetail, the only independent national newsletter by and for Jewish-Christian families. Hawxhurst has seen membership in Dovetail grow from 100 to 1,000 this year.
Because of the interest in Dovetail, she realized many of the needs of interfaith couples were not being met. Together with the owners of three other businesses catering to interfaith couples, she formed a consortium called Interfaith Family Resources in 1995.
Besides Dovetail, the other members are Good Company, a Chicago-based distributor of an interfaith ketubah, produced by a Reform rabbi, and Black Bear Productions, which distributes a book written by an interfaith couple who have been married for 32 years.
Today there are approximately 800,000 interfaith households in the United States, according to Egon Mayer, director of the Jewish Outreach Institute, a national think tank created eight years ago to forge a link between interfaith families and the Jewish community. It is based at the City University of New York graduate school,
In Chicago, at Rabbi Allen Secher’s congregation, Makor Shalom, about one-third of the 100-member families are intermarried. For this reason, he created an interfaith ketubah, sold through the Good Company.
“I perform mixed marriages and in every single one of these, the Jewish partner has been very attached to the idea of having a traditional ceremony,” Secher said. “They want a ketubah because it is a covenant that certifies their marriage.
“My ketubah makes a statement about the couple supporting each other’s own traditions and both partners can honestly sign that document.”
While Secher calls the document an “interfaith ketubah,” some rabbis see that term as an oxymoron.
Rabbi Seymour Essrog of the Conservative Beth Shalom of Carroll County, Md., said, “By definition a ketubah is a Jewish document used in the union of two Jews. I understand that these are very sensitive situations, but I don’t know if we have to go overboard to diminish the Jewish aspects of the ceremony.”
Sharing their experiences with other interfaith couples is what inspired Mary and Ned Rosenbaum two years ago to write their book, “Celebrating Our Differences: Living Two Faiths in One Marriage,” which was distributed by Black Bear Productions. The Rosenbaums each maintain their own faiths. She is a practicing Catholic and he is an observant Jew. Of their children, only their daughter, Sarah, converted to Judaism; their sons, Ephraim and William, have not made decisions about their religious observance yet.
Mary Rosenbaum, 52, encourages couples to learn from others’ experiences. “The more you share with other couples, the more you communicate, the better off you’ll be,” she said. “You’re not always re-inventing the wheel. Sometimes what worked for someone else can work for you too.”