To facilitate the interaction between Bride and Lightroom it's possible to use the color labels from bridge by going in the Lightroom menu to
Metadata -> Color Label Set
And then choose
Bridge Default
I still lost the rejected status, but with my color labels back up and running, it's just a question of permanently deleting the rejected images before importing them into Lightroom and I'm good to go. Another solution for those that I don't want to delete just yet is to not use the rejected status but one of the color labels.
So the solution was in settings and in a slight adjustment of my work flow.