Supreme Court of the United Kingdom: To Be or Not To Be Jewish: The UK Supreme Court Answers the Question; Judgment of 16 December 2009, R v The Governing Body of JFS, 2009 UKSC 15

Extract

On 16 December 2009, the UK Supreme Court held a state-funded Jewish school to be guilty of discrimination based on ethnic origin in the way it operated its admissions policies. The Jewish Free School (JFS), one of the top-performing schools in the country, refused a place to a thirteen year old boy, M., because it did not consider him Jewish. It is a fundamental tenet of traditional Judaism that to be Jewish one must be born of Jewish mother or to a woman who converted into Judaism prior to his/her birth. M.'s father was Jewish by birth, but his mother, who was originally an Italian Catholic, had converted to Judaism with the criteria set by a non-orthodox branch of Judaism. The School's admissions standards only recognized orthodox criteria for conversion as valid, hence deeming neither M. nor his mother to be Jewish.