Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

German Gov’t Drafts Bill Allowing Circumcision

BERLIN—Germany’s Ministry of Justice has presented a draft law to permit circumcisions by doctors and mohels in response to uncertainty about the procedure fueled by a Cologne court’s ban on the procedure.

The Cologne court’s June ruling, which angered many among the country’s 4 million Muslims and 100,000 Jews, held that circumcision deprives a child of the right to self -determination and inflicts “bodily harm” and “assault.” The ruling resulted from the circumcision of a four-year-old Muslim boy who was hospitalized due to medical complications following the procedure.

Though strictly local in jurisdiction, the court’s ruling generated uncertainty about circumcisions in the rest of Germany and sparked an international uproar. Coverage of the issue came from as far away as Japan. In Hof, a small town in northeastern Germany near the Czech border, a local resident lodged charges recently against a 64-year-old rabbi for performing circumcisions—though under Germany’s legal system, in which any citizen can lodge charges against another, this does not mean the government will ultimately find a prosecution is warranted.

Initial Jewish reaction to the draft law was positive. “From our point of view it is a step in the right direction,” said Dieter Graumann, President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. “The Federal Ministry of Justice deserves respect for presenting such a wise proposal.”

Members of the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, said there were few details available, but early responses were positive. Dietmar Nietan, a Social Democratic Bundestag member, told the Forward he believed that a law on circumcision would be passed by the end of the year. Nietan said it would be Germany’s first legislation on the ritual. The Cologne court ruling took on greater importance because there was no national law on the subject.

Philip Missfelder, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party, said Wednesday that the draft law ensures the practice of the Jewish religion and children’s welfare

But Deidre Berger, director of the American Jewish Committee in Berlin, voiced concern about the proposal’s prospects. ”Public opinion seems to be against circumcision and many parliamentary delegates from all parties are against it,” she wrote in a September 26 email to the Forward.

Berger added that major medical associations in Germany oppose the procedure in this highly secular nation, where many people sees numerous religious traditions as relics of the past. Opponents are likely to contend that circumcision inflicts bodily harm and that anaesthesia should be required in the procedure. The current draft of the legislative proposal stipulates only that use of anaestheisa is preferred, she said. Many Orthodox mohels oppose its use on the grounds that injecting an anaesthesia to the area of the circumcision causes an infant greater pain than the procedure itself.

The circumcision draft proposal will be reviewed by other government ministries and then be submitted to the Bundestag for debate and a vote.

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

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.