Julia Pozniansky said the bureaucratic and legal struggles were worth it. The case garnered extensive media coverage, she noted, and demonstrated that posthumous reproduction need not be viewed as science fiction, but rather is a procedure that needs wider support. Her appearances in the Israeli press were a chance to correct misconceptions and present a public plea that she hoped would silence the procedure’s critics. “I would say to whoever is against it, let’s also give up on penicillin, because that was also once seen as interfering with divine punishment,” she said, sardonically. “If we don’t make a step forward, if we say, ‘No, it’s not allowed,’ [miracles] will never open up before us.”

In Israel, IVF is one of the rare issues supported by nearly all sectors, regardless of religion or sexuality, in an infamously divided society. “There’s a very strong urge to have children here,” said Julia Pozniansky, who immigrated to Israel from Russia with her husband and two sons several decades ago. After losing Baruch to cancer, she underwent IVF at the age of 55 and gave birth to another son with the use of a donor egg. “There’s tradition, family, 2,000 years of persecution in which we’ve needed to rise from the ashes to create life.” Like many Jewish Israelis, Pozniansky sees reproduction as a way to replenish the numbers of the Jewish people, in the wake of the Holocaust and millennia of Jewish suffering.

Of her legal focus, Rosenblum says her upbringing has motivated her to “help families not just to survive, but to live.” Both of Rosenblum’s parents had numbers tattooed on their forearms from time they spent in concentration camps before immigrating to Israel. Holiday dinners, she recalled, were never with relatives, but with neighbors, who had also lost entire extended families in the Holocaust.

As semi-official state policy, Israel has encouraged Jewish residents to have children with the goal of sustaining a Jewish majority and, more recently, to counter the higher fertility rates of Palestinians in the occupied territories. After the 1967 War, in which Israel conquered East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights, bringing 1 million more Palestinians under Israeli rule, the Israeli Demographic Center was established to increase Jewish birth rates, a mission the government described as essential to the survival of the Jewish people. Within Israel’s borders, 1.7 million Arab citizens are also entitled to state-paid fertility treatments. There are no statistics on their representation as IVF patients, though there is at least one known case of an Arab Israeli couple recently undergoing posthumous IVF.

Several posthumous reproduction cases were recorded in the mid-1990s, in which both spouses and genetically related family members filed requests, but the issue was thrust into the national spotlight because of one of the most sensitive events in Israeli society: the death of a young soldier. On August 20, 2002, during the Second Intifada, Staff Sergeant Keivan Cohen was shot by a Palestinian sniper during a military operation in the Gaza Strip. His mother, Rachel, contacted Rosenblum and trudged through a decade-long battle to use her son’s sperm to impregnate a woman of her family’s choosing.