The Berlin prosecution has dropped its investigation against a prominent local rabbi who vowed to continue performing circumcisions, saying that his statements did not constitute any illegal behavior.
Berlin prosecutor Matthias Weidling told Rabbi Yitzhak Ehrenberg that the charges filed against him in mid-August — for “disturbance of the public peace and other offenses” — had been halted.
Weidling stopped the proceedings even before initiating a investigation because the police complaint against him contained “no indications of illegal behavior.”
As reported by The Times of Israel, Ehrenberg had become the second German rabbi to be charged in connection with remarks he made regarding the current circumcision controversy raging in that country. In June, a Cologne court declared the ritual illegal.
As a direct consequence of that ruling, a German citizen last month filed a police complaint against Rabbi David Goldberg, from the Bavarian town of Hof, who said he had performed hundreds of circumcisions in recent years.
On July 11, Ehrenberg — a well-known figure among German Jews — participated in a debate on “Anne Will,” a popular talk show, dedicated to the Cologne ruling and its implications. “Circumcision is a basic law for us Jews. There is no Judaism without circumcision, and therefore — we will continue,” Ehrenberg said during the show.
In a letter to Ehrenberg, Weidling, the Berlin prosecutor, wrote that the law obligates the authorities to follow every hint received of an illegal act.
However, he added that authorities could only start investigating if there were concrete indications of any such activity. “This is currently not the case,” Weidling wrote.
The question of how to apply the Cologne ruling to Ehrenberg’s pledge to continue circumcisions could “remain open,” the prosecutor added.
Since the Ehrenberg’s remarks didn’t call on others to commit illegal acts and no cases are known of circumcisions that were performed as a direct result of his words, there was no reason to further investigate the issue, he wrote.
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