27 June 2012
– B’nai Brith Canada has communicated the Canadian Jewish community’s outrage to the German government over a Cologne district court’s ban on circumcision, a core, 5, 000-year-old tradition of monumental significance to the Jewish faith. B’nai Brith Canada has called on the German government to immediately step in and challenge the District Court of Cologne’s ban on circumcision.
Frank Dimant, CEO of B’nai Brith Canada, issued the following statement:
“Circumcision is not merely a tradition that has been carried out since Judaism’s inception; it is a fundamental principle of the Jewish religion. This is certainly not the first challenge to the Jewish people’s millennium-old quest for religious freedom; countless nations in history have tried and failed to prevent the continuity of the Jewish people and their traditions.”
“We believe that the District Court of Cologne’s recent ban on circumcision flies in the face of Germany’s post-war legacy of religious freedom and harkens back to its dark past when institutional discrimination led, step by incremental step, to the Holocaust, the most heinous crime in human history. It is ironic that the current ban on circumcision has taken place in a city that itself saw the mass execution of 11, 000 Jews during those dark days.
For more information, please contact Aaron Rosenberg,
Communications Officer at (647) 227-4404 and communications@bnaibrith.ca.
B’nai Brith Canada has been active in Canada since 1875 as the Jewish community’s foremost human rights agency