Some 400,000 Israelis who consider themselves Jewish are not recognized as such by the country’s chief rabbinate, and are thus unable to marry other Jews legally. Of these, many—often immigrants from the former Soviet Union—are of partial Jewish descent and thus halakhically non-Jews, even if they came to Israel under the state’s law of return. Others are Ethiopian Jews whose status is uncertain, or converts whose conversions are not recognized by the chief rabbinate. Shlomo Brody suggests a halakhic solution:

The World Health Assembly—the annual meeting of the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO)—will conclude in Geneva tomorrow. As it has every year since 1968, it dedicated part of its time to discussing “health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory, including east Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan.” The fact that this is a permanent yearly agenda item for the assembly has nothing to do with any special medical circumstances in these areas, nor with any particular ability the WHO has to provide healthcare to their inhabitants. Rather, it is another example of the capture of the United Nations by the anti-Israel movement. David May explains: