Belgian police raided the home of at least one mohel in Antwerp on Wednesday and confiscated his equipment in connection with complaints lodged against him by a local Jew, JNS has learned. A mohel is an individual trained to perform ritual Jewish circumcision, or brit milah.
According to reports, the homes of several other mohels were raided in addition to that of Rabbi Aharon Eckstein, one of the most experienced mohels in the country.
Eckstein told JNS that the raid had occurred at about 5 a.m. “They didn’t say much. They just looked through the place and took my kit,” he said. He intends to continue performing circumcisions, “because I have not been told not to,” he added.
The search was based on a complaint filed against Eckstein and other mohels by another rabbi, Moshe Aryeh Friedman, in 2023. Friedman claimed that six mohels, whom he identified to police, had endangered children by sucking the blood from the penises of babies on whom they’d performed the Jewish ritual, a custom known as metzitzah b’peh.
Eckstein does not perform this custom, he and several people who had their sons circumcised by him confirmed to JNS. Friedman has publicly criticized multiple customs that are important to ultra-Orthodox Jews in Belgium and Antwerp, where they account for most of the city’s 18,000 Jewish population.
Rabbi Mencahem Margolin, who is based in Brussels and heads the European Jewish Association, condemned the raids.
“This constitutes yet another red line crossed in the intimidation of Jewish religious figures in Belgium,” he told JNS. “Following the ban on shechita [kosher ritual slaughter], the harassment of mohels represents a further red line and a clear warning sign to Belgian Jews and the Belgian government. Freedom of religion must be upheld!”
Belgium is among several European nations that have recently outlawed shechita and its Islamic counterpart, dabhiha or zabiha. These religious slaughter methods, which require animals to be conscious at the time of killing, are criticized by animal rights advocates as inhumane.
A comparable controversy is playing out around the nonmedical circumcision of boys. However, unlike ritual slaughter, this practice has not yet been banned in any European country.
