Hospital department chief brings in bread to protest ‘delusional’ hametz law
Head of neurology at Soroka Medical Center posts photo of himself bringing non-kosher for Passover food into workplace in defiance of government policy, saying ‘madness must stop’
The head of a department at Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba publicly brought leavened food to the hospital on Sunday to protest a ban on such products in hospitals during the Passover holiday.
Gal Ifergane, the director of the neurology department at the hospital, said he took the step to protest government “madness” that caused it to pass allowing hospitals to bar leavened products, known as hametz, from their premises.
Religious Jews eschew hametz during Passover. The issue of bringing the products into hospitals has become a flashpoint in the widening rift between the secular and religious elements of Israeli society. Policy regarding hametz in hospitals has come to a head in the past week, the first Passover since the hardline right-religious government took power.
“I never ate hametz during Passover. This year, for the first time in my life, I bought hametz during Passover and publicly brought it into the hospital,” Ifergane said in a public Facebook post.
“No one stopped me. Because the country is sane. Only the government is delusional,” he wrote. “A free citizen, a free nation. The madness must stop.”
The issue of hametz at hospitals came to a boiling point last week when a guard at Laniado Hospital in Netanya confiscated a snack from a woman several days before the start of the holiday, as some medical centers prepared to implement the government’s “hametz law” passed by the Knesset the week before.
The law bans hametz in hospitals during the week of Passover and leaves it to hospital directors to “use their own judgment in how to notify visitors and staff” either by posting their policies on their website or with signage at entrances, but it does not explicitly allow security guards to search patients’ or visitors’ bags to enforce the policy.
Several large hospitals have said they will post signage on hospital premises but not search belongings to enforce the restrictions. Some said they would set up designated spaces or lockers for anyone wishing to keep hametz there.
The new hametz law was sponsored by the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, outraged after a 2020 High Court of Justice ruling blocked hospitals from searching bags to check for hametz in response to petitions decrying the searches as invasive and religiously intrusive. The court extended its ruling to army bases last year.
The fight over hametz in hospitals has become a symbol for both secular and religious Jews of their fight over religion’s place in the Jewish state, and of the legislative moves by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government — Israel’s most hardline to date.
The issue came to a crescendo in April 2022, when the fight over hametz and its ties to religious values in the state was said to be the immediate catalyst for a member of the previous razor-thin coalition to defect, kicking off a three-month tumble toward the previous government’s collapse.
Last week, an organization dedicated to religious freedom petitioned the High Court against the new law.
The Health Ministry said on Sunday in its response to that petition that the new law did not authorize hospital security to confiscate leavened products during Passover.
On Friday, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich censured activists for bringing pizza to a hospital in Ashkelon during the holiday, while the city and southern Israel were under threat of terrorist rocket fire from Gaza.
Smotrich made the comment in response to a Twitter post of a donor bringing two stacks of pizza boxes to the hospital while wearing a shirt that said “happy holiday of independence,’ in a reference to the Passover story, in which the Jews escaped bondage in Egypt.
Smotrich said that the donor had twisted the holiday’s meaning, likening him to the “evil son” from the Passover Haggadah and quoting a line about that son: “If they had been [in Egypt], they would not have been redeemed.”
The Times of Israel Community.