The Chesir-Teran family outside their South Orange home just hours before Ian, left, departed for Israel and his role on the TV show Ima Machlifa. Saying good-bye and getting ready to welcome their surrogate spouse/mother from Israel are Daniel Chesir-Teran, holding Tamar; Eli, front; and Yonah.
Sidebar
Take my wife — pleaseApril 10, 2008
When Ian Chesir-Teran heard that an Israeli television show modeled after the ABC network’s Wife Swap was seeking an American family, he applied.
After all, the Chesir-Terans are the very model of a suburban Jewish family — residents of South Orange, they are synagogue members and working parents with three children.
It also helped that the Israeli show was looking for a family whose parents are gay. Ian and Daniel Chesir-Teran are a gay couple, and their two adopted sons and one daughter are black.
“On a lark, I reached out and, lo and behold, they became interested in our story,” said Ian, a part-time attorney and full-time rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.
Producers of Ima Machlifa (Substitute Mother) agreed to make the Chesir-Terans one half of a transcontinental exchange for an episode of the show.
As in the American version, two families with very different profiles exchange wives/mothers; the show chronicles their challenges over the course of the “swap.”
On April 7, Ian left for an unknown destination and a week-long assignment as a surrogate parent in an Israeli family. Taking his place in South Orange is an Israeli who will share parenting responsibilities with Daniel.
The program is scheduled to air on Israel’s Keshet network.
While the Chesir-Terans’ four-year-old son, Yonah, and two-year-old daughter, Tamar, “are not so aware of it yet,” said Daniel a few days prior to Ian’s departure, six-year-old Eli “was ambivalent. Ian was going to be away, and Eli was nervous about another person in the house.”
“We know very little about the mother. We are assuming it is a straight family but we don’t know that for sure,” said Daniel, an assistant professor of family and child studies at Montclair State University.
“For all I know...she could be a lesbian,” said Daniel, “but I doubt that’s the case.”
Whatever the case, he said, Eli is excited about “having a surrogate mom because he has never had a mom before. I think it will be a good, positive thing.”
The gender preference issue is one of several big concerns the two men share about the parent exchange.
If, in fact, the Israeli couple are straight and do not know the Chesir-Terans are gay, that “could be a problem or a source of some confusion,” said Ian. “I am taking it on a leap of faith that the kind of family that would agree to appear on a show that has a premise like this would at least have one thing in common with our family, which is that we are open to new experiences and learning things about ourselves and other people.”
Daniel said that if the substitute mother “were to be really flipped out by the fact that we’re a gay family or a multiracial family, she will be under very clear directions that any issues she has around that she will bring to me, and not in front of the children.”
“She is not going to talk to the children about ‘Don’t you wish you had a mommy and a daddy instead of two daddies?’”
The Chesir-Terans, who are members of Congregation Beth El in South Orange, have no idea how observant the visiting mother is — or even if she is Jewish.
“It wouldn’t be a problem for me if she is not religious or kosher, but the producers know we keep a kosher home, and one of our conditions for being on the show is that that be respected,” said Daniel.
In addition to keeping the youngsters’ school schedules and his work schedule, she must respect that the family “has to be able to be shomer Shabbat.”
Naturally, both men have been wondering about the person who would play a brief but important role in their family’s life.
“Wouldn’t it be great if she were an Ethiopian woman?” Daniel mused. “It would help bring my family’s racial and religious identities together in an interesting way. Or what if she were a stay-at-home mom who left 10 kids back in Israel? Ian could experience that and come home and feel our lives are much easier.”
To Ian, the main advocate for participating in this televised bit of social engineering, the broadcast will “expose the Israeli public to a different kind of family, a family with two fathers that in some respects is holy and in some respects is as mundane as our heterosexual counterparts.”
“Bottom line: It’s a TV show. It’s entertainment, right? But you know what?” said Daniel, “This might also be a test of our own tolerance. Who knows in what ways the other family is going to be different from us? Hopefully we will be able to rise to the occasion as well and be as tolerant as we would hope people would be of us.”
Take my wife — please
PRODUCERS OF Wife Swap are looking for Jewish families to participate in the ABC prime time show.
“Out of pure coincidence, many of our families have come from a Christian background. We are eager to branch out and diversify the spectrum,” wrote associate producer Michelle Silva in an e-mail to Washington Jewish Week.
Participants must be two-parent families with at least one child between the ages of six and 18. They must be willing to have the mother trade places with one from another family for a two-week period.
The first Wife Swap television show premiered in England in 2003 and in the United States a year later. Since then it has spawned versions in at least 10 countries, including Israel. Sometimes family match-ups have been controversial.
In 2005 a participant on the American show sued the ABC network when the surrogate parent who came to his family was a gay man.
A year later, an Israeli Arab woman named Amal Ahmed Abdullah walked away from her Jewish surrogate family a day ahead of schedule after constant bickering with its father, Sean Movsowitz.
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