Published: 3 March 2020
Last updated: 5 March 2024
WHEN DR AMY BROWN, a paediatric pulmonologist who lives in Irvington, New York, and is Jewish, found out she was expecting a son, she started asking friends and family about mohels. Traditionally a mohel is a rabbi, a cantor or another religious leader who performs the brit milah, or bris, a circumcision ceremony, on an eight-day-old Jewish boy.
She found the options for her son’s bris less than appealing.
“I learned about one man who had a license plate that said, ‘SNIP IT,’ and I was like, ‘No.’”
A month before her due date and still without a mohel, Dr. Brown read an article about Dr. Dania Rumbak, a paediatrician and a mohel, and felt huge relief, she said, thinking that Dr. Rumbak, as a woman, would bring empathy to a procedure that so often is rote. “Men have this tone of, ‘This is how it has been done,’” she said.
For centuries, the role of mohel was dominated by male religious leaders. But that is changing. Over the past 20 years, a shift has occurred within Conservative and Orthodox Judaism to embrace more doctors and medical professionals as mohels.
And now women — many of them doctors and not necessarily rabbis — are offering a new option, holistic in its approach, for Jewish parents. They have so much business, they said, that they can’t keep up with demand. Some have quit their day jobs to perform the brit milah full time.
FULL STORY Jewish women move into a male domain: ritual circumcision (New York Times)
Photo: Dr Blake gives a toast to the family after the Brit (Nora Savosnick/NYT)
