For a brilliant illustration of how to avoid official regulatory regimes read: On Burning Ground by Michael Skakun http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/031220566X This is the story of the author's father, Joseph Skakun, a rabbinical student who lived in a small Polish village at the time of the Nazi invasion. He was faced with certain legal and practical difficulties that he had to overcome. He was fluent only in Yiddish, he was circumcised, his experience was limited to Yeshiva and shetel life. By the end of the war, he was an SS recruit living in Germany officially designated as a Lithuanian (and thus almost an Aryan in the Nazi racial classification scheme). His main survival technique (which all of us can use) was to analyze a harsh regulatory regime, find a category uncovered by the harshness, and include yourself in that category. The one survival technique he possessed was knowledge. Just to give you a flavor... He dealt with his circumcision "problem" not by sleeping with hooks and weights (as some other Jews did), but simply by knowing that several small communities of Tartars lived in Poland. These residual invaders from the past were Muslims and thus circumcised. He merely declared himself a Tartar. Author Michael Skakun was lucky in his choice of parents. His next book is going to be about his mother who was a member of a community of Jews exported to Siberia to save them from the Nazis. She then walked to Tehran and the Brits shipped her to Palestine (by ship) in the middle of the war. DCF