Brit. high court to determine who's a Jew

LONDON, Nov. 10 (UPI) -- The British Supreme Court is poised to decide an alleged discrimination case to determine who is a member of a religion, records show.

A 12-year-old boy, identified in court documents only as "M," applied to London's Jewish Free School but was rejected as not being Jewish. The school's reason for the rejection is that although M's father is Jewish, his mother was converted in a non-Orthodox Jewish ritual ceremony, the New York Times reported Tuesday.

"This is potentially the biggest case in the British Jewish community's modern history. It speaks directly to the right of the state to intervene in how a religion operates," said Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle newspaper in London.

The issue is whether the school's test of Jewishness was legally based on religion, or illegally on race or ethnicity. The court ruled the test was based on ethnicity in that it looked to M's mother's status rather than whether the boy considers himself Jewish and practiced Judaism, the New York Times reported.

The court said while it was legal that Jewish schools give preference to Jewish children's applications, admissions must depend not on family ties, but "on faith, however defined."

The ramifications of the decision are unclear as to how it would affect other religious schools. Catholic schools, which look to whether a student has been baptized as an admissions criterion, fear they will have to adopt similar tests, the newspaper reported.