Hey Mr. Mayor, Remember Your Promise

Image by getty images

Hey, Mr. Mayor! When you were the public advocate of the City of New York — an office with little more than a megaphone — you criticized city agencies for failing to respond to Freedom of Information Law requests. Government, you said, must be held accountable!

Now, Mr. de Blasio, you’re the mayor, and it’s time for you to follow your own advice. Especially when it concerns the health of the most vulnerable citizens of your great city.

As our Paul Berger reports, the city health department appears not to be enforcing its own rule requiring written parental consent before a controversial circumcision rite called metzitzah b’peh, known as MBP, is performed on an 8-day-old infant. What’s more, one of the city’s big-deal mohels, Rabbi Avrohom Cohn, chairman of the American Board of Ritual Circumcision, is flouting the rule with apparent impunity.

The Forward’s attempt to get a response from the city — eight emails, four phone messages, one FOIL request on appeal — have gone unanswered. So we’ll remind you of a few other numbers. Since 2000, 14 infants have been infected with herpes during MBP. Two died. At least two others suffered brain damage.

You want that on your conscience? Are you listening, Mr. Mayor?

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. Discover more perspectives in Opinion. To contact Opinion authors, email [email protected].

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.

This year, we have stood together in strength and sorrow. Our Forward team has worked around the clock to help you find clarity amid the chaos.

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