Charge quashed for speeding rabbi

Charge quashed after speeding rabbi explains he had a circumcision emergency

Canwest News Service
Published: Wednesday, June 18, 2008

A speeding ticket issued to Quebec's Jewish chaplain for prisons was quashed after convincing a judge he had been rushing to a medical emergency: a baby boy who was bleeding from a ritual circumcision. "It wasn't like I was going 120 kilometres per hour --I was going a reasonable speed," Jacob Levy told Judge Alain St-Pierre in a Montreal municipal court on Monday, where he contested the ticket. After listening to the rabbi's story, the judge said Rabbi Levy had proven the "necessity" of why he had been speeding, and threw out the charge. Rabbi Levy, who used to be grand rabbi of Geneva, leads a Sephardic congregation. Trained in Jerusalem as a mohel, the Hebrew word for circumciser, Rabbi Levy has been practising the ritual procedure for 30 years. His first case was his own son, he told St-Pierre, showing his surgical kit as proof of his trade. Rabbi Levy testified he had received an emergency call from a distraught mother whose eight-day-old boy had been recently circumcised. The bandage had come off and the boy was bleeding. (NationalPost)

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