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From: R. Feldman
Subject: Self-attestation
Date: 12 Kislev 5781
The chair would note that the specification's approach was deliberate. We did not arrive here by accident.
We considered several alternatives:
1. Verification by a recognized authority. The specification would include a registry of authorities whose attestations are accepted. But which authorities? The Chief Rabbinate? The Conservative movement's Rabbinical Assembly? The Reform movement's Central Conference of American Rabbis? Chabad? Each addition would be contested. Each omission would be an insult. We would spend more time maintaining the authority list than developing the specification.
2. Verification by community attestation. Multiple individuals vouch for the claim. The specification would require, say, three community members to confirm Jewish status. But how many is enough? Three? Ten? And what happens when a community is small, or dispersed, or when someone has left their community of origin? We would be privileging those with dense community ties over those without.
3. Verification by documentation. Upload your papers. A birth certificate, a conversion certificate, a letter from a rabbi. But this excludes those whose documentation was destroyed (in the Shoah, in displacement, in emigration), and privileges documentary cultures over oral traditions. My own family has stories but few papers.
Self-attestation avoids these problems by not attempting verification. The specification records what people claim about themselves. The interpretation of those claims is left to consuming systems. This is not a complete solution. But it is the only solution that does not require us to adjudicate questions we cannot answer.
—Yaakov Feldman, Chair
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