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My husband and I are adopting from Guatemala, which some of you may know is a fairly lengthy process. So it will be quite a few months yet until we bring our hoped-for-son home. If all goes well he will be 5-7 months old when we bring him home. At that point, I know he will have to be circumcised by a pediatric urologist -- both the rabbi at my synagogue and a pediatrician I know of have referrals of urologists who can also do the ritual aspects for it to be a bris and not just a medical circumcision.
However, I know that some families still also do a naming ceremony either that day or shortly thereafter. I would be interested to hear how any of you created bris/naming ceremonies for your adopted children. Did you do anything special because the child was older? Did you include anything that specifically acknowledged that the child was coming in to your family and to the community through adoption?
I know all of the stuff about conversions, mikvah, bris, Orthodox rules, etc. So I'm not looking for that part of the conversation -- but more the personal stories of things you did that might be a little different from a traditional bris/naming ceremony.
Thanks!
Devora
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Hi Devora and Mazel Tov,
Our daughter came home in May 2003 and we had the conversion in our pond in July (had to wait for it to warm up). It was just us the rabbi and the Bet Din.
We had the naming ceremony and party much later, in October. We waited because we were exhausted in the beginning, I was going back to work and DD, who was 18 months old when she came home, was still getting to know us and our family.
We definitely did address adoption in the ceremony--we talked about her three names, her Indian birth name, her American name and finally, her Hebrew name. And we talked about the three places where she lived, with her birth family, in the orphanage and with us, her forever family. I wanted to make sure that we paid homage to her birth family.
Two books that I borrowed ceremony ideas from were "The New Jewish Baby Book: Names Ceremonies Customs a Guide for Today's Families" by Anita Diamant and "Celebrating Your New Jewish Daughter: Creating Jewish Ways to Welcome Baby Girls into the Covenant-New and Traditional Ceremonies" by Debra Nussbaum Cohen. Both books had sections about adoption.
We had the ceremony in our home, catered by an Indian restaurant (the rabbi thought that was a riot).
We really felt that it was a particularly special way to welcome her into our family and my faith (DH isn't Jewish, but he wound up liking the ceremony, I think).
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