REMEDIES FOR IMPEDIMENTS TO MARRIAGE
marriage by means of a legal fiction. Thus, she would not have been an adulteress and her child would not be a mamzer. Unfortunately, Schwadron’s ruling could not be carried out because her first husband had already given the woman a valid divorce. Hence, the recommended solution was theoretically valid but not applicable in practice.” It was, nevertheless, a halakhic tool that could be used to purify mamzerim in similar cases in the future.
Rabbi Jacob Saul Elyashar (1817-1906), the chief rabbi of Jerusalem , made an independent inquiry into the case of a young man, Israel , the son of Rachel, of Corfu , born in 1807, who together with three generations of his offspring were considered to be mamzerim. Elyashar and the members of his rabbinic team from Jerusalem reviewed testimony given in 1830 about his mother’s alleged adulterous relationship before Israel ’s birth.
They concluded that the testimony given sixty years previously was halakhically unacceptable and cleansed Israel and his offspring of the blemish of mamzerut ninety years after his birth, as well as three generations of his descendants.’
Rabbi Abraham Palache(1809-1899), the chief rabbi of Uzmir, was asked to investigate the case of a congenital eunuch whose wife was accused of having adulterous and incestuous relationships. The child she bore was declared a mamzer. Rabbi Palache convened a special beit din that included two Jerusalem rabbis and reached the following conclusions: Since the husband had never been examined by a physician, it was impossible to state with certainty that he was a eunuch. Rabbi Eliezer ruled in the Mishnah that a congenital eunuch, unlike a castrated man, could be healed
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