BOB ABERNETHY: Now our Cover Story. This week, Jews around the world will be celebrating Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, one of the holiest days of the year. But there's a cloud over this year's observance: bitter differences on who should be called a Jew. Our correspondent Stan Bernard examines this painful issue.

STAN BERNARD: Thank you, Bob. Jews are in a confrontation that is threatening an immense division within the world Jewish community. It's a debate that could have a profound effect on how American Jews view Israel, the Jewish homeland, the spiritual center of their religion. A near riot at the holy shrine, the Wailing Wall. Part of the twice-destroyed Jewish temple, a riot over which Jews can pray here. In Israel, Orthodox Jewish rabbis make the religious laws and want to expand their power with a proposed bill that would more strictly define who is a Jew. The Nazis had no such problem. The Nuremberg laws defined all with a trace of Jewish blood as Jews, either to be worked to death or gassed and sent to the ovens. The deaths of six million of all kinds of Jews and collective world guilt over the genocide was the central fact in the creation of the state of Israel, and why the first law passed in the new state was the Law of Return, granting Jews anywhere the right to become citizens. Finally the Jewish people had a homeland. The law broadly defined a Jew as a person with a Jewish mother or a convert to Judaism. Orthodox rabbis want the law changed to only those Jews who are converted by them. The proposal has incensed the vast majority of the Jewish community and its leadership in America.

Rabbi DAVID SAPERSTEIN (Religious Action Center, Reform Judaism): Ninety percent of American Jewry are unorthodox Jews. When they are told that their Judaism is not real Judaism, that their rabbis are not real rabbis, that their religious ritual practices are not legitimate, it causes them to question their identity and that of their children.

BERNARD: For Orthodox Jews, the answer to the "Who is a Jew" question can be found in the Jewish law, halakhah, a legal code derived from the Ten Commandments and the Torah they say God gave Moses on Mount Sinai, and rabbinical interpretations.

Rabbi DAVID HOLLANDER (Union of Orthodox Rabbis): The conservative and reform state clearly, unequivocally, believe that they are not bound by the eternal character of the biblical law -- the oral law, that they believe that the law has to be adjusted [to] the requirements of the time. The Orthodox believe that the times have to be adjusted to the Torah, not the other way around.

Rabbi JEROME EPSTEIN (United Synagogue Conservative Judaism): Our tradition has always looked for ways to interpret the text and interpret the word of God. If one looks in the Talmud, one would find various discussions between rabbis in which there was no one point of view.

BERNARD: Last March, Hollander's Union of Orthodox Rabbis flatly declared that Reform and Conservative branches were not Judaism. The battle was joined. Jewish unity was shredding. Even two of the largest Orthodox organizations disavowed what became known as the Fundamentalist Orthodox position.

Rabbi EPSTEIN: They're not willing to sit down and to talk and try to work out a solution to preserve for the future the unity of Israel. That's really the challenge.

BERNARD: The Goulding family recently visited Israel and is offended by the Orthodox proposal.