was not his biological brother. DNA tests conducted by two professors, the foremost experts in the Near East , proved this to be empirically true. The Tel Aviv District Rabbinic Court unfortunately refused to accept the conclusions of the professors.
It is impossible in most cases, to obtain positive proof of a blemish of which the Rabbinate accuses the person involved. Here we focus on probable halakhic solutions, which the official Rabbinate had left unexamined. We must now turn therefore to rabbinic precedents to discover how great rabbis solved similarly difficult situations.
MODERN RESPONSA ON THE PURIFICATION OF MAMZERIM
Human nature and sexual behavior seem to have changed little over the centuries, with the all-too-frequent consequence that
innocent persons are condemned to suffer. Not only the Sages and medieval decisors had the moral courage to resolve the problem; rabbinic authorities of the last two centuries searched the halakhic literature for practical solutions to their plight and found bold and innovative methods to release such Jews from the chains of mamzerut. A review of several cases from this period will exhibit ingenious halakhic methods for purifying mamzerim.
Rabbi Shalom Mordecai Schwadron was questioned about the case of a man who had abandoned his wife in Odessa and was later declared dead. Twelve years later his wife remarried. While she was pregnant by her second husband, news arrived that her first husband was still alive. The local rabbis ruled that she was an adulteress and the fetus she was carrying would be a mamzer. Schwadron advised effectuating a retroactive annulment of the first
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