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From: R. Halevi
Subject: Registry concerns
Date: 3 Shevat 5781
Devorah asks the right question, but I want to step back further.
We are designing a system that asks Jews to describe their Jewish identity in structured form and submit these descriptions to a central service. Even if the service stores only hashes, the act of submission creates a record. The certificate links a person to a unique identity description. The description existed. It was submitted. It was unique.
I am not comfortable with this, and I think we need to say why openly.
In our tradition, there are lists we do not keep. The Rema rules that records of mamzerim should not be maintained, even for legitimate halakhic purposes, because the existence of the list creates potential for harm that outweighs the benefit. Some knowledge should remain distributed, undocumented, known only to those who need it.
What we are proposing is the opposite. We are creating infrastructure for documentation.
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