A court in a small region of Germany banned circumcision, and we were told that it was nothing to worry about. They weren’t going to arrest any rabbis for performing the act on Jewish babies. Germany was going to fix it on the national level.
And yet, a rabbi has been arrested in Germany for peforming a circumcision. So Germany is once again arresting Jews for performing Jewish rituals. Way to go, Germany!
The German legislature is said to be working on a fix. That’s what they said months ago when the first ruling came down against circumcision, but this time, the entire Jewish world is united in outrage.
Meantime, Rabbi Goldberg, who performed the bris, says the law won’t stop him from performing more.
Germany will probably pass a law allowing religious circumcisions. But there are still places in Europe that have outlawed kosher slaughter, some as long ago as the 1800s (Sweden). And in France, echoes of the 1930s are running through the country.
The chief rabbi of Lyon, Richard Wertenschlag, has received a letter threatening to “punish a Jew for every complaint the Jews make on TV.”
The threat came in a two-page letter delivered to Wertenschlag on Aug. 10. It contained two photos of a concentration camp, according to Dr. Richard Prasquier, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France, CRIF.
Last week, Ban Ki-Moon criticized the Iranians for their calls to destroy Israel. This week, he is attending a conference of nonaligned nations held in Iran. He is going to be photographed shaking hands with a smiling Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, just like he is in this picture. It sends the message that the UN doesn’t actually care that a member state is violating the UN Charter by threatening another member state with destruction. And he is doing it in spite of calls by the U.S. and Israel to stay home.