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Yichud in Case of Doubt

1. When a therapist is working with a non-Jewish child, and the mother is home, is the therapist required to find out if the father is home(Would be very difficult)?
2. If the therapist is unsure if the father is home, is an open window shade to the street enough?
3. If the father and mother are home, is an unlocked door enough, or must it be opened? Some homes have no screen doors, so leaving the door ajar would mean letting in freezing gusts of wind or rain.
4 . Does the issue of yichud happen immediately ( after the first moment of seclusion), or does it come into effect after a certain amount of minutes? The nafka Mina would would be if say, someone closed or locked a door that was left open, and the therapist can try to rectify the situation, say, when the student is allowed to get up fora break.

Answer:

1. If it is hard to ask you don’t need to, and provided there is a reasonable chance that he is home, the prohibition of yichud will not apply.

2. If you are a room adjacent to the street, and there is a window facing the street, this is sufficient.

3. If both father and mother are home, there is no prohibition of yichud.

4. The prohibition applies immediately, whenever there is a possibility that the time of being together will reach a few minutes.

Sources:

For question 1:

For cases of safek yichud, the halachah is that for a possible Torah prohibition we must be stringent, but for a possible rabbinic prohibition we are lenient.

For a non-Jew, the prohibition is rabbinic, and therefore in cases of safek (doubt) we can be lenient. See: Tzitz Eliezer (6:40); Nesivos LeShabbos (22:1), Devar Halachah (15:1); Divrei Malkiel 4:102.

Although the matter can be clarified by asking, there is no obligation to clarify the matter of a rabbinic prohibition, unless it is easy to do so. In this case, clarification involves discomfort, and there is therefore no obligation to clarify.

See Peri Megadim (Sifsei Daas 110:6); Badei Ha-Shulchan (110:9 in Biurim).

For the other issues please see our article on the prohibition of yichud.

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