"There is no civil marriage in Israel; the institution is controlled by a religious authority, the Rabbinate. According to halacha, ancient Jewish law, either the applicant's mother must be demonstrably Jewish (the blood connection) or else the applicant must have converted to Judaism in a verifiably Orthodox ceremony (the cultural test). If unable to satisfy the authorities, immigrants may get married outside the country, and the state will accept the union. Secular Israelis who resent the strictures go abroad by choice, nearby Cyprus often providing their version of the Las Vegas wedding.Then the panel and the audience were asked to comment on a case study, a real one. An Eastern European woman who was a 12-year resident of Israel had documents affirming that her paternal grandfather was Jewish, but no proof of Jewishness on her mother's side save her own testimony. To bolster her claim for a marriage license, the woman went to a commercial gene-testing service and had her DNA analyzed, specifically her mitochondrial DNA. This part of the human genome is inherited strictly through the mother's line. She turned out to carry a genetic marker associated with Ashkenazi Jews, 1.5 million of whom carry it. Scientists had traced the marker to what they believe to be a founding lineage of the Jewish people in the Middle East. Should the religious authority take the biological evidence into account? Should the rabbi in charge give the woman a pass on the requirement for conversion?
The room crackled with people wishing to speak. The American geneticist Mary-Claire King, known for her research on heritable breast cancer, said that she hesitated to admit the mitochondrial marker as legal proof of ancestry. For one thing, she observed, not everyone carrying that marker was Jewish. It can be found in some Palestinians..."
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