London rabbi held in Ireland for alleged unlicensed circumcision

Authorities in Ireland arrested and then denied bail to a rabbi from London who faces criminal prosecution for allegedly performing circumcision without having the necessary medical credentials.

Jonathan Abraham was arrested Tuesday for allegedly violating Ireland’s Medical Practitioners Act of 2007, and he may receive a fine of €130,000 ($140,000) and five years’ imprisonment, The Irish Times reported Thursday night.

A detective told a judge at a bail hearing Thursday that she encountered the rabbi inside a domicile “dressed in a white robe, a doctor-style coat, with blue gloves and a scalpel in his hand” next to a changing pad, scissors and other medical supplies and implements. “A very young child on the changing pad naked” had already been circumcised and another one was about to be, she told the court.

Abraham’s lawyer told the court he was a certified mohel, a person who performs circumcisions in accordance with the Jewish faith and tradition, with 13 years of experience.

The chief rabbi of Ireland, Yoni Wieder, in a statement, wrote that “this case does not directly involve anyone from the Jewish community in Ireland and that he was not circumcising Jewish babies.”

Ireland is among multiple countries where Brith Milah, the Jewish circumcision of males that is typically performed on babies eight days after they are born, is legal but subject to restrictions, including that the person performing it have local certification. These laws are rarely enforced and often difficult to follow in small Jewish communities that depend on mohalim from abroad.

Abraham is the first rabbi in years to be prosecuted in the European Union in connection with a Brit Milah. He is expected to appear for another court hearing on August 6.

The affair is provoking outrage in the Jewish world, where some link it to the strident anti-Israel stance that Ireland’s government has taken during the Jewish state’s current conflict with Hamas, and which is encouraging a climate of antisemitism in Ireland, according to some from the country’s tiny Jewish minority of about 2,500 people.

“This is absolutely ridiculous. Just some good ‘ol Irish antisemitism,” Joshua Brumbach, an author and rabbi of the Simchat Yisrael Jewish congregation in West Haven, Connecticut, wrote on Facebook.

Allan Grant, a carpenter from Georgia in the United States, highlighted the fact that the first circumcision-related legal action in years in Ireland targets a rabbi and not someone from the country’s Muslim minority of about 80,000 people, where unlicensed circumcisions are thought to occur frequently.

“It’s only anti-Zionism, not antisemitism, right?” Grant wrote on Facebook. “Let them try that with their new Muslim immigrants.”