This is outside my personal experience/expertise, so I'll accept your statement about Orthodox conversion, but I'm thinking of things like http://en.wikipedia.o

This is outside my personal experience/expertise, so I'll accept your statement about Orthodox conversion, but I'm thinking of things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_return#Israel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_return#Israel: "This resulted in several hundreds of thousands of persons fitting the above criteria immigrating to Israel (mainly from the former Soviet Union) but not being recognized as Jews by the Israeli religious authorities, which on the basis of halakha recognize only the child of a Jewish mother as being Jewish." and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthright_Israel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthright_Israel "Eligible individuals are those who have at least one parent of recognized Jewish descent."