High Court rules hospitals can’t stop visitors bringing in bread during Passover
Ruling says guards can’t search belongings of visitors or make remarks about bringing in food that isn’t kosher for Passover; draws immediate rebuke from ultra-Orthodox lawmakers
The High Court on Thursday ruled that hospitals cannot prevent people from bringing their own food into their premises during the Passover festival.
The presence of leavened food products in hospitals during Passover has long been a source of friction between religious authorities and secular activists who have said the directive against it is a form of religious coercion.
According to the ruling, which came two weeks after the end of this year’s holiday, guards cannot search the belongings of visitors or make any remark or issue any instructions about bringing in food that isn’t kosher for Passover.
The justices noted that being able to bring in food to a hospital that is not kosher for Passover is part of the fundamental right to individual autonomy, and the religious freedom of every citizen in a democratic state. Therefore, the court said, hospitals have no authority to violate that right.
“At the heart of the recognition of human dignity as a constitutional right, the perception is that man is an autonomous and free being, who writes his life story and shapes his personality according to his wishes,” Judge Uzi Vogelman wrote in the ruling. “The ban on bringing food into a hospital during Passover does not allow anyone in the hospital at the time to eat the food he wants.”
However, in a dissenting opinion Judge Neal Hendel argued the petition should be dismissed because the issue could be resolved by mediation to find a solution that would fit both sides.
“There is a need for genuine discourse that recognizes not only one party’s position but also necessarily reaches a solution out of mutual respect. It will cost a certain amount of money, but that… does not exempt the parties from having to exhaust the possibility of reaching such a solution before going to the courts to decide on values,” Hendel wrote.
The Health Ministry and the rabbinate were ordered to pay NIS 50,000 ($14,000) for legal expenses relating to the case.
Religious Jews are forbidden from consuming — or owning — leavened wheat products, or hametz, during Passover. Some avoid public places where such food may be found during the week-long holiday.
The United Torah Judaism (UTJ) party, which is led by outgoing Health Minister Yaakov Litzman, announced that due to its anger over the ruling, it will support an “override clause” that allows the Knesset to overrule the country’s top court in some circumstances, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies have been pushing for.
“The judges are extremely insolent,” said UTJ MK Moshe Gafni. “What we legislators do with countless discussions and four plenum readings, they cancel with a single decision that lacks all logic, ruling according to their worldview without regard for anything else. We should end this.”
Other UTJ members issued similar statements, with MK Uri Maklev saying the court “is hurting patients who are careful about hametz on Passover, as most Israeli citizens are.
“The judges aren’t respecting hospitals as public places where the feelings of all populations should be considered. The court, with a series of recent foreknown rulings, is rushing toward blowing up relations between different parts of society and is doing everything to replace the leadership,” Maklev added.
UTJ MK Yisrael Eichler slammed the ruling as “dictatorial.”
“Everyone already knows the dictatorial method of the High Court. They no longer hide their anti-Jewish and anti-democratic tyranny. Putin is more democratic than those who rule the High Court,” he said in a statement, according to the Kan public broadcaster.
“The High Court is again showing it is completely disconnected from the people,” said MK Michael Malchieli of fellow ultra-Orthodox party Shas.
MK Tamar Zandberg from the left-wing Meretz party welcomed the ruling, saying the court “carried out justice against religious coercion and stopped a disgraceful practice at hospitals. A hametz police has no place in hospitals or anywhere else,” she said.
Secular rights group Be Free Israel and liberal religious Zionist organization Torah Vaavoda, which both joined the petition against the practice, also praised the ruling in a rare joint statement.
“There is a clear statement by the High Court here that the solution must come not by coercion, but through agreement and negotiation,” they said, calling on hospitals to adopt a system in which visitors will be asked not to use hospital utensils to consume their own food and use either their own or single-use utensils.
The Secular Forum, a petitioner, also welcomed the ruling, saying it was an end to a violation of rights.
“This is a great day for Israeli democracy in general and for the secular public in Israel in particular. Because the policies that have been practiced so far are a violation of the right to dignity and privacy, and the right to religious freedom,” the organization said in a statement according to Channel 12 news.
Though hospitals risked losing their Rabbinate-issued kashrut license for refusing to implement the ban, an increasing number of institutions had already been opting to ignore the rules. In 2019, 13 hospitals said they would disregard the annual directive from the Chief Rabbinate and the Health Ministry to actively ban food that is not kosher for Passover during the Jewish holiday.
The Passover custom of eating only unleavened products commemorates the Exodus of the Jewish People from Egypt, which, according to the Bible, took place so quickly that they did not have time for their bread to rise.
The Times of Israel Community.