Bagel Guy Gets 10 Years in Jail for $200K in Unpaid Fines
Image by haaretz
There’s a cell in Jerusalem’s Rimonim Prison that has two inmates. One was convicted of selling dozens of kilograms of dangerous drugs, and sentenced to six years. The second is Zaki Sabah, 54, who sells bagelach (a long, oval shaped bread) and was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment for not paying municipal fines imposed on him for peddling without a license.
Sabah, a resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Isawiya, will probably be released once some kind of payment plan is worked out. But what is a bagelach seller doing in prison in the first place, let alone with a harsher sentence than a drug trafficker?
The sentence was imposed two weeks ago by Local Affairs Court Judge Tamar Nimrodi. Her decision was a technical one, arrived at by aggregating 254 files opened against Sabah for peddling without a license. The thousands of tickets he received since 2005 had ballooned to fines totaling NIS 731,910.21, or about $20,000.
Because the nonpayment of any fine has a prescribed option of a few days in prison, the number of days that had accumulated totaled 3,554. Most of the hearings in his case were held in absentia, and since he had not reached a payment arrangement with the municipality, the judge consolidated the cases and approved the cumulative imprisonment orders. Shortly after the ruling, Sabah was imprisoned.
For more, go to Haaretz
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we need 500 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Our Goal: 500 gifts during our Passover Pledge Drive!
