Four-year-old Yonina plays with colorful bristle blocks and explains what it means to be adopted. "I was at a hospital, and I grew in my birth mother's belly, and I came out into my mommy's hands," Yonina says, smiling at her adoptive mother, Ellen Wiman of the District. `Her birth mother was very open to my being there," Witman says of Yonina's birth at a Boston-area hospital. "I very much wanted an experience as close to child birth as possible, and I love the newborn phase - the tiny, newborn phase," she says. Witman is a former president of the District of Columbia Jewish Community Center and a single parent by choice. She is president of Witman Associates, a governmental affairs consulting firm in northwest Washington. "I knew that I wanted to be a mother when I was 4 years old when my mother brought home my baby sister from the hospital," recalls Witman. "Life, being what it is, though, things didn't happen as I had planned. And I found myself in my late 30s, not married and very much wanting to be a parent." Witman endured years of treatment for infertility and several unsuccessful rounds of high-tech procedures. Approaching age 42, she then opted for adoption. While singles are discouraged, if not ruled out, by most private agencies, Witman was able to arrange the adoption of a healthy, Caucasian newborn through a now-defunct agency in Cambridge, Mass. Yonina was born on Jan. 7,1996 -one day after Witman's father, Jonas, had died. "This was meant to be," says Witman. "She is a perfect child for me. We are well-suited for each other." Being a single parent without a spouse to lean and for support and companionship "can be tough, but I'm fortunate," notes Witman. "I work for myself, which gives me flexibility. I no longer travel for work. I have arranged my life around being her mother." She adds, "I work because I need to, and because I like to." Witman is trying to start at the DCJCC, a local chapter of the Stars of David support group for Jewish adoptive families. An organizing meeting was held on Jan. 20 at the center. "It's important that our kids know that as non-traditional as our families may be, they are also similar to other families in the Jewish community," says Witman. "The face of the Jewish community is changing. While our parents' generation may consider some of our families anomalies, in the year 2012, when they are having bar and bat mitzvahs in synagogues, the children will be of every color, from different counties, from gay families and from single-parent families." She continues, "The world is not in neat categories any more. We are approaching the point where the Ozzie and Harriet version of a 'normal family' is now a minority." Adds Witman, "We are all committed Jewish families, and if the Jewish community doesn't face the fact that Jewish families are changing and need to be counted as an integral part of the community and not as anomalies, then it will be to the detriment of everyone."

© Merry Madway Eisenstadt