the confusion that this woman experienced is a common misnomer. we take our family names from our fathers. we take our tribal affiliation (kohen, levi, yisrael) from our fathers. we take our family customs and nusach from our fathers. the israeli government, in an attempt to affront the nuremburg laws of 1935, established the law of return, which identified persons eligble for automatic israeli citizenship based on maternal OR paternal descent.
however, when it comes to spiritual descent, whether a child is a jew or not, this is historically and halakhically passed on from mother to child. though our nation does not encourage conversion, it is acceptable. otherwise, irrelevant of religious observance, born a jew, always a jew. not born a jew, no matter how observant one is of the torah, he is still not a jew.
since this blog post began so serious, i'll lighten up the mood a little by a funny exchange from the movie "the big lebowski" that illustrates this issue:
Walter Sobchak: ......My point is, here we are, it's shabbos, the sabbath, which I'm allowed to break only if it's a matter of life or death...now, this issue has come to a fore by the recent court decision in the UK. essentially, UK jewish perochial schools are allowed to reject non-Jewish applicants. however, one family claiming to be "observant", has sued the school for discrimination against thier child born to a jewish father and mother who converted according to progressive (and not orthodox) standards.
The Dude: Will you come off it, Walter? You're not even *** Jewish, man.
Walter Sobchak: What *** are you talkin' about?
The Dude: Man, you're *** Polish Catholic...
Walter Sobchak: What *** are you talking about? I converted when I married Cynthia! Come on, Dude!
The Dude: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah...
Walter Sobchak: And you know this!
The Dude: Yeah, and five *** years ago you were divorced.
Walter Sobchak: So what are you saying? When you get divorced you turn in your library card? You get a new license? You stop being Jewish?
The Dude: ......You're living in the *** past.
Walter Sobchak: Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax...
[shouting]
You're goddamn right I'm living in the *** past!
the article mentions the court's ruling that basing school admissions on whether one's mother is jewish is by definition descrimination against ethnicity. the UK court decided to rule that a jew is one that goes to synagogue and performs acts of charity and should not be to which lineage you were born to. this, of course, will open up several pandora's boxes, such as thereby defining jews who eat on yom kippur as "not members of the tribe" due to lack of observance. we, as jews, do not believe that to be the case.
what scares me is that the UK courts thinking that they have authority over what defines a jew. where will they draw the line? will they next determine that every synagogue mustn't discriminate against an unrelaible kosher certification because "a rabbi is a rabbi"? maybe they'll define for us how to keep shabbat too.
the jewish state on the other hand, does have an inherent hand played in all of these issues. there is a constant intermingling of "church" and state. the general population has now learned to regret that historic error of defining that law of return in those terms. israel now has several hundreds of thousands of non-jews in the country that will eventually want to marry in and will face severe challenges in doing so. israel will now have to resolve this mistake by following the necessary guidelines: when determining a civil law that is existentially a spiritual / religious issue, they must take halkha into consideration to be the overriding factor to come to such decisions.



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