German Jews slam Israeli minister, chief rabbi for interfering in circumcision dispute
The leaders of Germany’s Jewish community have criticized
Interior Minister Eli Yishai and Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger for their
“unhelpful” involvement in the German circumcision controversy, saying their
comments constitute counterproductive interference in the affairs of an
independent Jewish Diaspora community.
“The two both unnecessarily strained the debate and
contributed to further uncertainty,” the heads of the Central Council of Jews
in Germany wrote in a letter to Israel’s ambassador in Berlin, Yakov
Hadas-Handelsman, the German-Jewish weekly Juedische Allgemeine reported on
Monday.
The dispute over circumcisions in Germany began in June
when a Cologne court declared the rite illegal. The debate intensified last
week when criminal charges were filed against a German rabbi who has performed
the operation hundreds of time. Apparently worried about their co-religionists
in Germany, Yishai and Metzger got involved. Metzger traveled to Germany, where
he met with senior politicians and government officials, urging them not to
touch the Jews’ right to conduct circumcisions as they please. Yishai wrote a
letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel in which he linked anti-Semitism in Europe
with the trend to ban Jewish rites and urged her to intervene.
President Shimon Peres also spoke up, sending a letter to
his German counterpart, Joachim Gauck, in which he urged Gauck to safeguard
“the rights of [Germany's] Jewish community to practice its religious customs
freely.”
The letter to the Israeli ambassador, signed by Central
Council of Jews in Germany President Dieter Graumann and his vice president,
Josef Schuster, does not mention Peres’s appeal.
The council viewed Metzger’s involvement “with some
surprise and discomfort,” the letter states. “This is an unprecedented act of
interference in the religious and political affairs of an independent Jewish
community outside Israel.”
Criticism has also come from some of Germany’s rabbis,
Juedische Allgemeine reports. Henry Brandt, the chairman of the General
Rabbinical Conference of Germany — a subsidiary of the Central Council of Jews
in Germany — said Metzger’s involvement was unhelpful because he was assuming
authority that he did not really have.
“He’s the chief rabbi of Israel; that is worthy of
respect. But he isn’t the chief rabbi of Germany,” Brandt said. “We have here
an intact rabbinate, both Orthodox and general, so we don’t need him to throw a
wrench in the works.”
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