De Blasio: Deal on Bris Milah a Great Step Forward

Mayor Bill de Blasio had strong words of praise on Thursday for an agreement his administration reached with the Jewish community that ends the city’s controversial regulation of bris milah.

“I think this is a great step forward for the health and welfare of our children, and I think it’s based on the real-world realities of a community that the city needs to relate to respectfully,” de Blasio said in response to a question by a reporter.

The mayor criticized the approach of the Bloomberg administration, saying that the regulation required mohalim to ask parents to sign a consent form before performing MBP “achieved precious little. It was rejected by community members. It wasn’t implemented. It wasn’t enforced — it was unenforceable, in fact.”

“So, you know, in the end, the previous administration got to say they did something, but it really didn’t, in my view, do enough to protect our children,” the mayor continued.

“What we’re doing conversely is, it starts in the hospital — and the relationship between the mother and her doctor and the hospital in which she has the child — information provided right there about the practice, including the option for the mother to say she wants to opt out, the opportunity to talk to health department officials and get more information. That’s a sea change right there.”

Yerachmiel Simins, an attorney for the Jewish groups who had filed the lawsuit against the regulation, agreed.

“As a city spokesperson said on the conference call with reporters, the assumption that these cases could only have been caused by MBP was wrong. Indeed, the Rockland experience underscored this: the mohel in two recent cases was proven not to be the source. This means that in the past, the city’s sole focus on the mohel likely missed actual sources of infection. The new approach is indeed a sea change,” Simins said.

“A comprehensive and collaborative evidence-based approach to find individual sources of infection undoubtedly will lead to better health care outcomes than a narrowly-focused, agenda-based one which was at loggerheads with the community it was intended to serve,” he added.

This article appeared in print on page 5 of the February 27th, 2015 edition of Hamodia.