Two Jews and a Muslim in Germany have started a pro-circumcision campaign to counter a Cologne district court ruling that bans the practice. Called “together against snipping off our rights,” the petition already has 300 signatures, according to The Local, a German publication. Its organizers – Mike Delberg, Michael Groys and Anil Celik – plan…
Germany’s Jews and Muslims will not be punished for breaking the law if they carry out circumcisions on young boys, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman said. “For everyone in the government it is absolutely clear that we want to have Jewish and Muslim religious life in Germany,” Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said Friday according to Reuters….
A controversial court ruling in Cologne that effectively prohibits most circumcisions in that city has touched a nerve worldwide, and sparked an outcry in Germany that has united Jews and Muslims in a rare common protest. The judgment, delivered on May 5 but only published on June 26, found that the circumcision of a four-year-old…
The New York City Health Commissioner has issued a strongly worded statement calling for an end to a controversial circumcision-related rite. Dr. Thomas Farley said that direct oral-genital suction, known as metzitzah b’peh, should not be performed during Jewish ritual circumcision, and announced that several hospitals, including those serving the haredi Orthodox Jewish community, have…
Two Jewish infants in New Jersey were recently infected with — but survived — a herpes virus attributed to their ritual circumcisers’ use of an oral suctioning technique that is said to have caused the death of an infant in New York in September. Dr. Margaret Fisher, chair of pediatrics at Monmouth Medical Center, told…
The debate over circumcision has spread to Colorado, where two lawmakers are seeking to reinstate Medicaid funding for the procedure after it was cut last year. The proposal, which is snaking its way through the state legislature, has sparked a broader conversation about circumcision in Colorado and beyond, with Jews on both sides of the…
When hundreds of thousands of immigrants flocked to Israel from the Former Soviet Union, they never dreamed that their absorption process could prove a missing link in a massive plan to combat HIV/AIDS in Africa. At the height of the wave of arrivals in the 1990s, Israeli doctors came face to face with a huge…
The Shmooze can think of at least one guy who won’t be performing a bris anytime soon. John Patterson, a doctor at Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Ky., is in court this week, facing a lawsuit for amputating a penis during what was intended to be a circumcision. He’s being sued by Phillip Seaton, who’s already…
100% of profits support our journalism
