Last week, a clear line was crossed in Belgium that echoes with the warnings of history and should shock the conscience of free society. In the early hours of the morning, Belgian police raided the homes of two respected mohels in Antwerp, confiscating their ritual circumcision equipment and demanding the names of the Jewish infants they circumcised in the past year.
Let there be no mistake: The raids, arrests and confiscations were not simple police actions. They were a direct assault on religious freedom, a chilling incursion into the private spiritual lives of a minority community and a shameful signal to Jews across Europe that their religious traditions are no longer safe in the public square.
There is no benign interpretation of these events. Armed officers descending upon religious leaders’ homes under the pretense of legal inquiry is the stuff of authoritarian regimes, not democratic Europe. The confiscation of ritual instruments used for one of the oldest and most central commandments in Judaism — brit milah, the covenant of circumcision — is to desecrate more than property. It is to trample upon the millennia-old continuity of Jewish life and identity.
The demand that mohels surrender the names of children they have circumcised is especially alarming. It represents not only a grotesque invasion of privacy but a potential threat to those families’ security. Why do the authorities need those names? What database will they enter? What precedent does this set for religious communities across Europe?
When religious practice is policed under suspicion, it is not law enforcement — it is persecution.
Unfortunately, this outrage is not an isolated incident. Belgium has already drawn international criticism for restricting kosher slaughter, a measure that has been seen by many as a thinly veiled attempt to suppress Jewish and Muslim practice under the guise of animal welfare. Now, it has targeted brit milah — a core Jewish ritual dating back to Abraham. Such orchestrated antireligion action by the state is wholly unacceptable.
The European Jewish Association rightly condemned the raids as a “red line crossed.” But they are more than that. They are a blaring siren of warning. When religious observance becomes the target of state action; when rabbis engaged in religious rituals are treated like criminals; and when police storm homes in search of religious items and names of ritual participants, affected communities properly wonder whether there is a place for them in that society.
This moment demands courage and clarity from Belgium’s lawmakers, its judiciary and its civil society. Where are the voices from the Belgian Parliament condemning these violations? Where are the champions of civil liberties and human dignity? If they are silent now, they are complicit in the erosion of the very values Europe claims to uphold.
We call for the immediate return of the confiscated religious items and a comprehensive investigation into the conduct of the Antwerp police and the judicial authorities who authorized the raids. And we urge the development of meaningful legal protections — clear, codified and inviolable — for the practice of religious circumcision in Belgium, alongside every other essential religious observance.
History is watching. The world is watching. The Jewish community of Belgium deserves better than fear, intimidation and humiliation for practicing
their faith. ■
