still supported his nomination, making it easier for their fellow Republicans to do the same. Rather than backing a highly questionable nominee, the senators should rise above pure partisanship and work to find a good nominee for the Eastern Judicial District, which includes 44 counties from Raleigh eastward.

That judgeship has the unwelcome distinction of having been empty for nearly 13 years — the longest-lasting judicial vacancy in U.S. history. The empty seat has caused a massive backlog of cases, especially civil cases. Farr first surfaced as a nominee under President George W. Bush in 2006. That nomination went nowhere, for good reason. During his two terms, President Barack Obama tried twice to fill the seat. He nominated two well-qualified African-American women, Jennifer May Parker and, later, Patricia Timmons-Goodson.cases in which olim to Israel from the former USSR are unable to prove their Jewish ancestry and even though they are eligible for an Israeli citizenship, the Chief Rabbinate would not recognize them as Jews for the purpose of marriage, burial, giving testimony, and a variety of additional endeavors that require one to be Jewish in Israel.

Rabbi Carmel believes his ruling would absolve about 40% of Russian olim of the need to convert in order to receive recognition as Jews.

The statistical portion of the ruling was approved by Rabbi Professor Nathan Keller, a graduate of the Einstein Institute of Mathematics in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a researcher of probabilistic combinatorics and cryptography; and the genetic research was approved by Professor Karl Skorecki, the Director of Medical