Halakhic authorities are divided over whether brain-stem death, the modern medical and legal standard used to determine death for organ donation purposes in most secular jurisdictions, satisfies the classical Jewish legal definition of death, a genuine and unresolved dispute rather than a settled ruling this atlas records as documented, opposing positions.
One position, associated with parts of Modern Orthodox halakhic authority, holds that brain-stem death is death under Jewish law, reasoning from classical talmudic discussion of a person who has stopped breathing to a criterion centered on the irreversible cessation of independent respiratory function, which brain-stem death entails; this position underwrites organ donation practice among the Israeli population and institutions that follow it.
A second, more restrictive position, held by much of haredi Orthodox authority and a substantial part of the Orthodox world beyond it, holds that Jewish law requires the complete and irreversible cessation of both heartbeat and respiration, a cardiopulmonary standard that does not accept brain-stem death alone, even with mechanical ventilation removed, as sufficient to establish death, a position with direct and serious practical consequences for whether organ donation from a brain dead but still mechanically ventilated body is permitted at all.