Rabbis Debate if Mothers Are Sole Path to Judaism : Lineage: Reform Jews confer religious identity through either parent. Orthodox and Conservative branches call that a ‘tragic decision.’

A testy argument seethes in Judaism over the lineage by which Jewish identity is bestowed. The conflict usually is not face to face. Instead, it smolders internally in separate branches and is rarely debated openly.

However, an unusual public clash between representatives of the two sides occurred recently as Reform Judaism marks the 10th anniversary of its decision recognizing that Jewish fathers, as well as mothers, transmit Jewishness.

Orthodox Judaism’s Rabbi Shlomo Riskin called the innovation “one of the most tragic decisions of our generation--an unbridgeable chasm that destroys the unity of the Jewish people.”

But a leader in the Reform branch, Rabbi Daniel Syme, called the change a “carefully thought-out Rabbinic response to the massive losses Judaism has suffered” because of alienation and intermarriage.

This typified the tone of the confrontation held recently before a mixed audience at Manhattan’s Lincoln Square Synagogue, an Orthodox institution.

Syme said: “We are fighting to lay claim to a whole generation of children--close to 1 million today--who are at risk in Jewish terms.

“We acted on the egalitarian principle that Jewish fathers have the right to determine the Jewish identity of their children no less than Jewish mothers.”

Riskin, defending the longtime rule that a child’s Jewishness is conferred only through a Jewish mother, said Reform’s instituting of patrilineal descent “was a great tragedy.”

It “leads to officiating at mixed marriages and accepting the scourge of assimilation,” he said. “Two thousand years of Jewish history have been abolished in one fell swoop by the introduction of patrilineal descent.”

He said that according to Halakha (Jewish law), “the children of non-Jewish mothers cannot be regarded as Jews no matter what Jewish rituals they choose to observe.”

Reform Judaism’s action recognizing Jewish fathers as conveying that identity came in 1983 after several years of consideration by Reform’s rabbinical body, the Central Conference of American Rabbis.

The change had been urged by Rabbi Alexander Schindler, president of Reform Judaism’s representative body, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, to curb the loss of children by Jewish males marrying Gentiles.

The innovation is not accepted by either of the two other major branches of Judaism, Orthodox and Conservative, both maintaining that only matrilineal descent conveys Jewishness.

While some Conservatives have voiced support for recognizing patrilineal descent in discussions by their Rabbinical Assembly, a strong majority has rejected it.

In the debate on the subject, Riskin was in a familiar environment at Lincoln Square Synagogue, which he formerly led. He now is chief rabbi of Efrat in Israel, a new town on the West Bank.

Syme is senior vice president of Reform’s Union of American Hebrew Congregations.

Both rabbis claimed backing for their cases in the Bible and the Talmud.

In most biblical lists of “begats,” as in Genesis 10, Jewish genealogy is traced through fathers, not mothers. However, Deuteronomy 7:3, in one of the Bible’s first five books, called the Torah, condemns marriages with heathens.

But through most biblical times, Jewish leaders often married non-Jewish wives and their offspring were considered Jewish. Moses married Zipporah, a non-Jewish Midianite, and their two sons were considered Jewish. So were offspring of Joseph and his non-Jewish wife, Asenath, a non-Jewish Egyptian.

The book of Ruth claims Jewishness was imparted by a Jewish great-grandfather, Boaz, to Israel’s great King David. Boaz’s wife, Ruth, was a non-Jewish Moabite.

But long after David, about 500 B.C., after the return to Israel of the Jewish exiles from Babylon, the prophet Ezra denounced widespread Jewish marriages to foreign, heathen wives as corrupting Jewish loyalty to God.

Ezra’s influence led to a reform covenant renouncing such marriages and instituting the principle that Jewishness is transmitted only by a Jewish mother. Syme said that rule was not fully accepted for several centuries because it differed from past biblical practice.

But Riskin maintained that ever since, for the last 2,000 years, “Talmud and the Code of Jewish law, with no dissenting opinions, have explicitly stated that the religion of the child is determined by the mother.”

“The introduction of patrilineal descent is a catastrophe of the first order--a major blow against the unity of the Jewish people.”

But 10 years after Reform’s action, Schindler said “the Jewish world is still whole.”