https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/282092
When my parents put my three sisters and me into yeshiva day school, Brooklyn’s Yeshiva Rambam at 3121 Kings Highway in the 1960s, they simply enrolled me. No one asked whether I was Jewish, whether my Mom was Jewish. In Brooklyn circa late 1950’s and early 1960’s, if you said you were Jewish, then you were Jewish. What kind of non-Jewish nut would go out of his or her way to claim to be Jewish in those days? Where was the gain? The Ivy Leagues then had quotas restricting how many Jews could be admitted into their colleges. Major law firms barred Jews from practicing in their coveted environs in any legal department except for bankruptcy law, which the white-shoed country-club class deemed too slimy and greasy for anyone other than grubby Jews to practice. Even many hospitals still denied admittance privileges to Jewish doctors, forcing Jews in every major American city to build their own Mount Sinai in New York, Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Jewish Hospital in Jersey City, and such in every city. But not today.
Today normative mainstream Modern Orthodox rabbis associated with the Rabbinical Council of America quietly conduct investigations that sometimes go back generations to determine whether a prospective bride or groom has authentic matrilineal Jewish roots. The Modern Orthodox rabbis ask the prospective young lovers who approach them to conduct their marriage for names of the maternal grandparents, particularly the maternal grandmother, where those grandparents were born, where they attended shul, what rabbi back then knew them, who can attest to their having been Jewish.
If the maternal grandmother has died and was not a shul-goer, then other investigatory questions are asked: Where are they buried? Is there a ketubah buried somewhere in the archived paperwork? A pair of old candlesticks, a pushka, an old siddur (Orthodox prayer book) or chumash (Jewish Bible)? What proof is there? It is not uncommon for my colleagues and me to get photos of cemetery tombstones emailed to us from smartphones to prove Judaic status.
The same questions are asked in OU congregations when newcomers prospectively apply for shul membership. YU asks it of prospective new students. Every normative mainstream Modern Orthodox Jewish Day School in America today asks, as a fundamental component of a student enrollment form, for incontrovertible proof that the proposed new student is actually Jewish, the child of an authentically Jewish mother or converted halakhically. Those schools do not want their graduation certificate after eighth grade or high school graduation to be used falsely to demonstrate Jewish status that does not exist.