Sad. But I suspect that there is a touch of antisemitism behind this story. There seems to be a growing movement on the left to abolish the practice of circumcision entirely, as we saw recently in San Francisco.
One case after eight years in NYC, with its numerous hospitals. How many other people have died in those hospitals from accidental infections? And are they sure this was the cause of the infection?
If so, then I hope they will deal with the problem sensibly.
If this is ginned up by anti’s, it would seem they targeted the subgroup that does the suction directly by mouth without even the recommended sterile glass tubing. That was a disaster waiting to happen with or without the anti’s.
No, this was traditionally the way cricumcision was done and there’s nothing anti-semitic about it. Contact with blood was considered a contamination, making one ritually impure, so only designated people could do this. While non-orthodox mohels generally don’t do it that way now, this is simply because of Western distaste for the idea.
One of the problems with the ultra-orthodox is that, like Muslims, they live two lives. One life theoretically conforms to an enormously complicated ritual code, and the other is basically what they give themselves excuses to do “off the books.”
A member of this community was recently nabbed in NYC for killing his wife, which he thought he’d get away with because the ultra-orthodox don’t allow autopsies. She was found dead in the bathroom...but it turned out, when her family learned that he had taken out a huge insurance policy on her and they then requested an autopsy, that she’d been strangled.
Evil is everywhere. Orthodox Jews can be infected with it just as easily as anybody else, and if the mohel had herpes, I’d say there was a problem there.
I am battling a staph infection I contracted over 2 years ago when my mother was a patient at one of the top teaching hospitals in the US. Hospitals are dirty places.