Only you can weigh it. What this page can do is make the question concrete, because “we will raise them Jewish” is an agreement that two people routinely make while meaning quite different things.
It is also the most commonly deferred conversation in Jewish dating, and the one people most often say they wish they had had earlier.
What “raising them Jewish” can mean
All of these are things people mean by that phrase:
- They know they are Jewish and that is roughly it
- Holidays, a seder, some family tradition
- Hebrew school, a bar or bat mitzvah, then largely done
- Jewish day school through to eighteen
- Shabbat as the structure of the week, every week
- Camps, youth movement, a Jewish peer group by design
- Israel as a real presence — visits, family, language
- An expectation that they will marry Jewish
A couple can agree enthusiastically on the sentence and disagree on nearly every item.
The specific conversations
Schooling
Often the largest single financial decision of a family’s life, and it tends to be treated as a values question when it is also a budget question. Day school fees can rival a mortgage. Couples should know what each assumes, and what happens if the money is not there.
The week versus the calendar
There is a real difference between a Jewish home that shows up a few times a year and one where the week has a shape. Children experience these as completely different childhoods.
What you do if they push back
At some point a child will not want to go, will want to eat something, will want to do what their friends do. What is the rule? More importantly: do the two of you have the same rule? Children find a gap between parents faster than anything else in a household.
Whose family, how much
Grandparents are usually a major part of how Jewish identity actually transmits. Which set, how often, and what happens when one set expects more than you intend to give.
What you would actually be sad about
The most useful question on this page. Imagine your child at twenty-five with no Jewish practice, no Jewish partner, and no particular attachment. Sit with it honestly.
Some people find they mind very little. Some find they mind enormously and had no idea. Either answer is fine; not knowing which one you hold is the problem.
What the research suggests, carefully stated
Studies of Jewish continuity in North America — including the Pew Research Center’s surveys of Jewish Americans — consistently find that intensive Jewish education, youth programming, Israel experience and home observance are associated with stronger Jewish identification in adulthood. Home practice tends to show up as more predictive than formal schooling alone.
These are population-level associations rather than guarantees about any particular child, and they cannot tell you what to want. They are useful mainly for calibrating expectations: a bar mitzvah on its own does not reliably do much, and what happens at home does more than most parents assume.
Where this touches halachah
A child’s Jewish status, in traditional halachah, follows the mother, and the movements differ on this — which is covered properly in the article on Jewish status. If that question applies in your family, it is a rabbinic matter and it is better addressed before children arrive than after, not least because it affects them rather than only you.
If the two of you disagree
Being at different points is normal and workable. What makes it workable is naming the actual gap rather than settling for a form of words.
The useful move is to get specific and find where the disagreement really sits. Often it is narrower than it feels — two people who both want a Jewish home arguing about schooling costs, which is a solvable problem. Sometimes it is wider, and it is much better to know that now.
The Questions Before Engagement tool builds the specific list for your situation, and Pre-Marriage Alignment coaching is where couples usually work this one through properly.