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From: R. Kovacs
Subject: The Bx code
Date: 16 Iyar 5781
Rav Halevi's point about vulnerability stays with me.
My zeyde used to say there were questions you did not ask. When a new family arrived in Munkács after the war, you did not ask where they came from or who they had lost. You did not ask why their Yiddish had a strange accent or why they did not know the local customs. They were Jews. They were here. That was enough.
The questions we are encoding, the B codes, the background codes, my zeyde would have found them obscene. "You want to write down who is a convert? Put it in a file somewhere? What kind of system is this?"
Perhaps the solution is to remove the Bx code entirely. Not to fix it, but to eliminate the question.
If there is no "decline to state" option, everyone must choose something. Born Jews could use B?, meaning "unknown, complicated." Converts could use B? as well. The patrilineal Jew whose status is contested could use B?. The person who genuinely does not know their family history could use B?.
The question becomes genuinely unanswerable. And maybe that is as it should be.
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