Will Sephardim join pre-marriage testing push?

“There is no person in the world without issues,” says Rabbi Yosef Ekstein, the founder of the organization Dor Yeshorim (“Upright Generation” in Hebrew), a confidential genetic screening system used around the world, mostly by Ashkenazi Jews in the Orthodox community. 

Ekstein’s words are meant as a call to action to the Sephardic Jewish community to also embrace genetic testing, and to help stop the tragedy of giving birth to children with genetic diseases. He was echoing the comments of Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel Yitzchak Yosef, who last month told his constituents, “All Sephardim [should] get tested before holding a vort (engagement) to avoid any problems, chas v’shalom.”

Yosef’s remarks, Ekstein told JNS.org, could be the needed catalyst to encourage Sephardim to get genetic testing for diseases unique to their community. While Ashkenazim have been widely tested for Tay-Sachs and other genetic diseases since Dor Yeshorim’s founding in the mid-1980s, lack of research about Sephardic genetic disorders and minimal outreach to Sephardic Jews have meant that the same levels of testing and disease eradication do not exist in that community.

Dr. Ohad Birk, head of the Genetics Institute at Soroka Medical Center in the southern Israeli city of Be’er Sheva and of the Morris Kahn Lab of Human Genetics at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), explains that one of the reasons for the lack of research is that the Sephardic community is more complex and disparate than the Ashkenazi community. The same genetic mutations exist in Ashkenazi Jews from throughout Eastern Europe—Poland, Germany, Hungary, and so on. In contrast, there are distinct genetic mutations for each of the Sephardic communities, such as those from North Africa, India, Morocco, and Ethiopia.

Further, while the majority of global Ashkenazi Jewry lives in the United States and is willing to invest in genetic research, the Sephardic community—in many cases in Israel—has had less funding to support these initiatives.