[Marxism] religion kills

["acpollack2@xxxxxxxx" <acpollack2@xxxxxxxx>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/05/nyregion/05ritual.html?pagewanted=print

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January 5, 2006
City Officials and Rabbis Clash Over Rite 
By JIM RUTENBERG and ANDY NEWMAN
Some Orthodox Jewish leaders are calling on city health officials to end their 
campaign to educate parents about the alleged health dangers associated with an 
ancient form of ceremonial circumcision. But officials say they will not oblige.

The procedure is known as oral suction, or metzitzah b'peh, because the 
practitioner, or mohel, sucks the blood from the wound created by the 
circumcision to clean it.

Early last year city officials said the procedure might have led to three 
recent cases of herpes in infants, one of them fatal. But the city put off 
taking any aggressive action as it continued to investigate the cases, though 
it said even then that it would most likely not ban the procedure because it 
did not want to violate religious freedoms and a ban would be impossible to 
enforce.

But after concluding last month that the procedure had indeed caused those 
three cases along with two others - one in which the infant suffered brain 
damage - the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said it would recommend 
against the procedure and begin a public education campaign about its risks. 
The practice is nearly universal in many Hasidic sects.

Several Hasidic rabbis, arguing that the city was unconstitutionally 
interfering with their centuries-old religious practice, met on Friday with Dr. 
Thomas R. Frieden, the commissioner of Health and Mental Hygiene, asking him to 
stand down, city officials and religious leaders who were there said yesterday. 
The leaders, who maintain that the practice is safe and that the evidence that 
it causes herpes is not definitive, had even threatened to protest at Mayor 
Michael R. Bloomberg's inauguration on Sunday, the attendees said.

Health officials and Jewish leaders in attendance said the leaders' general 
demands were threefold: that the city cease its educational drive, that it stop 
investigating possible cases and that it stop investigating rabbis it suspects 
of transmitting herpes - common in the mouths of most adults - to infants 
during metzitzah b'peh.

After confirming, in an e-mail statement, that those were the demands, Andrew 
Tucker, a spokesman for the Health Department, said the department "continues 
to recommend against the practice of MBP, and to educate parents about the 
issue."

Dr. Frieden said the same thing to the religious leaders at the meeting on 
Friday, which ended in acrimony. It became tense when members of the group, the 
Central Rabbinical Council of the United States and Canada, asked Dr. Frieden 
to cede authority in the matter to state health officials, who have largely 
kept out of the matter. Dr. Frieden responded by suggesting that their request 
was akin to his asking them to cede their religious authority to Catholics, 
said one Jewish participant at the meeting, who recounted the exchange on the 
condition of anonymity because he said he did not want to be publicly 
identified with the fight. 

Health officials confirmed that Dr. Frieden made the comment, but, they said, 
he did so only to make a point hyperbolically that asking him to cede his 
authority to the state was just as outrageous. They said he apologized 
afterward for any remarks perceived as offensive. 

As of this week the dispute seemed to be at a standstill. Rabbi David Niederman 
of the United Jewish Organization in Williamsburg and an attendee at the 
meeting, said he and other Jewish leaders would not give up their fight.

"We will not compromise on performing the ritual the way it has been done for 
thousands of years," Rabbi Niederman said yesterday. He said he would appeal to 
the mayor, who, he said, would be receptive to his argument that the issue was 
essentially a religious matter best left to rabbinical authorities.



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