Quebec’s Jewish chaplain for prisons got a speeding ticket dismissed, after convincing a judge he’d been rushing to a medical emergency: a baby boy who was bleeding from a Bris Mila (ritual circumcision).
“It wasn’t like I was going 120 kilometres an hour – I was going a reasonable speed,” Jacob Lévy told Judge Alain St-Pierre in Outremont municipal court, where he contested the ticket.
After listening to the rabbi’s story, the judge said Lévy had proven the “necessity” of why he’d been speeding, and threw out the charge.
Lévy, who used to be grand rabbi of Geneva and also lived in France, leads the Sephardic congregation at Beth Rambam synagogue in Côte St. Luc. Trained in Jerusalem as a mohel, Lévy has been doing Brisim for 30 years.
His first Bris was his own son, he told St-Pierre at the Van Horne Ave. courtroom, where he’d brought along his surgical kit as proof of his trade.
Lévy testified he’d received an emergency call from a distraught mother in Côte St. Luc whose 8-day-old boy had been recently circumcised. The bandage had come off and the boy was bleeding into his diaper.
(Source: The Gazette)
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9 Responses
Hasn’t this happened tons of times before?
#1, tani,no , it doesnt happen all the time.i think it was a point of interest that the canadian judge recognized the serious nature of the speeding and dismissed the charges .it would be as if an hatzolah ambulance was ticketed speeding to an emergency.
to tani: what’s happened tons of times before was a bris in a speeding car!
only kidding!!!
A chaver of mine who is a Rabbi in a few Montreal Hospitals regularly gets speeding tickets because of crisis intervention calls and manages to win every single one. He has a way with the judges, he has been to almost every different courthouse in the city.
shlichei mitzva einoi n’zikin…
oh traffic court’s a joke- ppl get off even if they plead guilty.
To #7
My mother O”bm told me that there was a Mesorah in Germany that the first Miloh done by a Mohel was his own son. The Mitzvoh is incumbent upon the father who can optionally make the Mohel his Shliach.
#9, that’s a very cutting joke.
actually, that is not true. What he really told the judge was that one of the members of the montreal canadians needed to have a surgery performed, in order to facilitate his playing well next year. Therefore, the habs sent him bench tickets as a thank you, and he was generous enough to share them with the judge