Israel’s Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that hospitals cannot ban visitors, patients or others from bringing chometz into hospitals on Pesach.
Israeli hospitals traditionally ban chometz on their premises on Pesach, including patients and visitors. According to instructions issued by the Rabbanut and the Health Ministry, security guards check visitors for chometz at hospital entrances.
In 2018, the Adalah and Secular Forum non-profit organizations filed petitions to the Supreme Court against the ban of bringing chometz into hospitals on Pesach
The judges wrote that the ban violates the right to autonomy, dignity and freedom of religion.
“The judges are full of arrogance,” Degel HaTorah chairman Moshe Gafni said in response to the ruling. “What we legislate through endless discussions and meetings and four votes in the Knesset plenum, they annul with a decision that is not based on any reason, arbitrarily ruling according to their worldview. If we want a democratic and Jewish life – we have to put an end to this process.”
Transportation Minister Betzalel Smotrich said: “The Supreme Court continues to destroy the principles of the Jewish state and impose progressive and insane principles in a non-democratic fashion and without authority to do so. The Supreme Court seems to be running the state and making more and more decisions in a way that renders the democratic system and the people superfluous. The question is when will the people wake up and realize it’s gone too far.”
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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2 Responses
The courts need to be reined in, that is true; but what is the purpose of this ban? What legitimate interest does a hospital have in preventing patients who are not observant, or even not Jewish, from bringing in their own chometz and eating it in their bed? The chometz does not become the hospital’s property, and the person in the next bed will not eat it, so what’s the problem? It seems to me that if I were someone who eats chometz on Pesach and I had to be in a hospital at that time I would resent such a rule, in what is supposed to be a free country.
full agreement with milhouse.