Germany Plans Law Allowing Circumcision
Germany’s Justice Ministry proposed to amend a law on the circumcison of male children to safeguard the rights of Jews and Muslims to perform the ritual.
The amendment, which aims to cement religious rights while responding to critics of the practice, would allow ritual circumcision only with parental consent and performed by a practitioner according to medical standards, and only with the strongest degree of anesthetic medically allowable given the child’s age.
While Jews circumcise healthy infant boys on the eighth day, Muslims often perform the procedure on older children.
Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger composed the text. If approved by the parliament, a paragraph would be added to the law code on the rights of children.
According to the law on “the circumcision of male children,” it would remain a commission of “bodily injury” but would not be punishable as long as parents followed the law’s requirements, according to the Suddeutsche Zeitung national daily newspaper.
The Central Council of Jews in Germany has not responded officially to the proposal. The deputy head of the Association of Turks in Germany greeted the proposal positively, the German news agency DPA reported.
The new proposal follows months of debate sparked by a controversial ruling issued last May by Cologne District Court that criminalized non-medical circumcisions of minors. Jewish and Muslim groups in a rare show of solidarity demonstrated together recently in Berlin against what both groups see as an attempt to curtail religious freedom.
Representatives of the Green Party, the Social Democrats and the Left Party already have protested the new proposal, according to DPA, calling it “alarming” that the protection of a child from bodily harm seems to have taken secondary importance.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO