Sixth Generation and the Defeat of Demography
The Rav Yosef Shalom Elyashiv has just had a great-great-great-grandson. That means, his grandson is now a great grandfather. Or if you prefer, his great-grandson is now a grandfather.
The Rav is either 99 or 100 years old (there seem to be no witnesses left to confirm which), so if you do the maths you'll see that such a thing is possible, so long as each generation gives birth at 20, or even if one generation misses but the next recompenses by starting at 18.
Elyashiv, the most important Rabbi in the Misnaged (non-Hassidic) part of the Ashkenzi Haredi world, and as the patron of some of the Haredi MKs also an influential political figure, is by all accounts lucid, active and thus aware of his new status, though I'd be surprised if he can keep track of all his descendants. He and his wife had 12 children; one was killed in the War of Independence and another died in infancy, but all the others so far as I know had children. But then, his contemporary, Benzion Netanyahu, also closing in on 100 and lucid, doesn't have any great grandchildren at all, so far as I know, and by the time they get born and become grandparents the present generation of Elyashivs will easily be ahead by another six generations.
The story of the Haredi fecundity is truly an oddity. Those of you who have studied demography know that the demographers have their models, and along with the sociologists and others they have all sorts of neat explanations for why birthrates rise and fall; I remember when I took some courses about this it all sounded plausible. Nothing I learned then explained how an entire section of society, living in a country with modern medical facilities and low rates of child deaths, could have a birthrate that rises from generation to generation over generations. And no, it's not Israel's willingness to subsidize their children, because that willingness flows and ebbs according to the Haredi MK's ability to coerce the government while the birthrate rises steadily; anyway, the Haredi birthrate in America is also consistently high. It's not economics, because extraordinarily wealthy Haredi billionaires have lots of children, and impoverished ones with five kids in one room also do. And no, having Haredi women enter the marketplace doesn't seem to make much difference, either. There's a whole brigade of 30-something Haredi women trained as system analyst-types in the high-tech world (my experience has consistently been that they outsmart everyone in sight), and each of them has six or eight children alongside her career.
If I had to name one single reason for all this, my guess would be the Holocaust. The Haredis are trying to refill. There's ample anecdotal evidence for this, of course, but I doubt anyone has proven it.
The Rav is either 99 or 100 years old (there seem to be no witnesses left to confirm which), so if you do the maths you'll see that such a thing is possible, so long as each generation gives birth at 20, or even if one generation misses but the next recompenses by starting at 18.
Elyashiv, the most important Rabbi in the Misnaged (non-Hassidic) part of the Ashkenzi Haredi world, and as the patron of some of the Haredi MKs also an influential political figure, is by all accounts lucid, active and thus aware of his new status, though I'd be surprised if he can keep track of all his descendants. He and his wife had 12 children; one was killed in the War of Independence and another died in infancy, but all the others so far as I know had children. But then, his contemporary, Benzion Netanyahu, also closing in on 100 and lucid, doesn't have any great grandchildren at all, so far as I know, and by the time they get born and become grandparents the present generation of Elyashivs will easily be ahead by another six generations.
The story of the Haredi fecundity is truly an oddity. Those of you who have studied demography know that the demographers have their models, and along with the sociologists and others they have all sorts of neat explanations for why birthrates rise and fall; I remember when I took some courses about this it all sounded plausible. Nothing I learned then explained how an entire section of society, living in a country with modern medical facilities and low rates of child deaths, could have a birthrate that rises from generation to generation over generations. And no, it's not Israel's willingness to subsidize their children, because that willingness flows and ebbs according to the Haredi MK's ability to coerce the government while the birthrate rises steadily; anyway, the Haredi birthrate in America is also consistently high. It's not economics, because extraordinarily wealthy Haredi billionaires have lots of children, and impoverished ones with five kids in one room also do. And no, having Haredi women enter the marketplace doesn't seem to make much difference, either. There's a whole brigade of 30-something Haredi women trained as system analyst-types in the high-tech world (my experience has consistently been that they outsmart everyone in sight), and each of them has six or eight children alongside her career.
If I had to name one single reason for all this, my guess would be the Holocaust. The Haredis are trying to refill. There's ample anecdotal evidence for this, of course, but I doubt anyone has proven it.
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)
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