DETERMINING DEATH IN JEWISH LAW
Human organ transplantation of various kinds have been successfully performed for four decades. The first heart transplant took place in Capetown in 1963. Since then there have been lung, heart, liver and other organ transplants in many parts of the world including Israel . In the beginning of each new surgical transplant procedure there was a high mortality rate among the recipients.
At the end of the 1960’s, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein of New York and Israel Chief Rabbi Yehudah Unterman proclaimed that heart transplants were tantamount to double murder of both the donor and the recipient. The donors were not considered dead before the extraction of the organ. A very large percentage of recipients died shortly after surgery."
In 1976, Feinstein wrote a responsum to his son-in-law , Rabbi Prof. Moshe Tendler , of the Departments of Biology and Talmudic Law at Yeshiva University , stating that he had revised his position on brain death. Prof. Tendler had informed him that it had become possible to determine by various tests that there was no longer any connection between brain and body, the brain had already been completely destroyed and would be considered like a decapitated person... once the death of the person has occurred and can be determined, there is no halakhic obligation to maintain treatment or artifical support of the corpse. Thus, according to Moshe Feinstein , there is no religious imperative to continue to use a respirator to inflate and deflate the lungs and thus maintain the cellular viability of other organs in an otherwise dead patient.”