As American lawmakers take extraordinary legal measures to reconnect a feeding tube to brain-damaged Theresa Schiavo, religious leaders are wrestling with the facts of the right-to-life case and are coming to different conclusions.

While Florida courts have sided with Mrs. Schiavo’s husband, Michael Schiavo, and have ruled that Ms. Schiavo, 41, is in a permanent or persistent vegetative state, religious leaders, like the rest of the country, are divided on whether religious law permits doctors to remove her feeding tube and end her life.

“Once the tube is inserted, it should be left there,” said Joseph Potasnik, a conservative rabbi at Congregation Mount Sinai in Brooklyn Heights. “If saving a life is a paramount concern, then once you have started the process of preserving life you shouldn’t withdraw the support once it’s been administered.”

For Rabbi Potasnik, who is the executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis, Mrs. Schiavo’s doctors are preserving her life rather than preventing her death – a critical distinction that plays an important role in understanding how Jewish law applies to such cases.

Mrs. Schiavo, who is hospitalized at the Hospice of the Florida Suncoast in Pinellas Park, has never regained consciousness since February 25, 1990, when a heart attack due to a potassium imbalance left her brain-damaged. She does not need a respirator and she is able to make reflexive responses. A state court opinion stated that the cerebral cortex is “simply gone” and “unless an act of God, a true miracle, were to recreate her brain, Theresa will always remain in an unconscious, reflexive state.”

Mrs. Schiavo’s feeding tube was removed on Friday – the third time it has been taken away – after a Florida circuit judge, George Greer, ruled that her parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, had exhausted all their appeals. Mrs. Schiavo’s parents have argued that their daughter would have wanted to keep on living, and that a chance for recovery still exists.

In such a condition, removing her feeding tube is the equivalent of allowing a person to die peacefully, according to Rabbi Robert Levine, a reform rabbi at Congregation Rodeph Sholom on the Upper West Side, who has a different interpretation of Jewish law.

Rabbi Levine said Jewish law does not prohibit removing “external impediments to death.” Ms. Schiavo’s feeding tube, which has sustained her for 15 years, is such an impediment, he said.

“It doesn’t mean the person will die, but that God can give or take a life,” he said.

He cited the Shulchan Aruch or Set Table, a body of Jewish legal code written in the 16th century that handled the question of a goses, or someone close to death. Rabbi Levine said the text offers two examples of “impediments” that may be removed if a person is in a grave state – a loud woodchopper making noise near the patient and salt on the patient’s tongue.

Barry Freundel, an Orthodox rabbi at the Georgetown Synagogue in Washington, D.C., said Mr. Schiavo and Judge Greer “are acting as God. They are taking this woman who is not dying and they are going to kill her…They are allowing her to starve to death.”

Rabbi Freundel said Talmudic law makes clear that adding an additional factor leading to death that did not exist before is prohibited.

Last week, Agudath Israel of America, a national Orthodox organization, issued a public plea to Michael Schiavo that he reconnect the feeding tube. “All of us have a responsibility to preserve even severely compromised human life,” said Rabbi Avi Shafran in a statement.

The Reverend Peter Byrne, pastor at the Immaculate Conception Church in Staten Island, said Catholic teaching argues that the feeding tube is “considered ordinary eating” and must not be taken away from a patient. “It’s considered feeding somebody,” he said.

He pointed to a declaration made a year ago by Pope John Paul II on the issue of sustaining the life of a person in vegetative state. The pontiff, whose statement has been used by Mrs. Schiavo’s parents as part of their legal argument, said a person who is alive cannot be considered to be in a vegetative state.

“He is and will always be a man, never becoming a ‘vegetable’ or ‘animal,'” the pope stated, according to the Associated Press. Removing a feeding tube would be considered “euthanasia by omission.”

Shamsi Ali, an imam at the Islamic Cultural Center of New York on 96th Street, said, “There is no basis to get rid of her simply because she is unconscious. Islamic law is clear that if she is still alive medically, she has the right to preserve her life.”