Published: 11 August 2020
Last updated: 5 March 2024
THE RELIGIOUS JEWISH WORLD has created some unusual jobs, from shofar makers to etrog pickers to mashgichim – kosher certifiers whose job is literally to watch others cook.
But one of the more bizarre surely belongs to Dr Yeshaya Shafit, who is Russia’s only mohel, or professional circumciser, for adult men.
Shafit, a 56-year-old surgeon, travels across that vast country to circumcise about 10 Jewish adults every week, splitting his time between Russia and the United States. Jewish ritual circumcision, called a bris or brit milah, is typically performed on 8-day-old babies, as dictated by Jewish law. Adult circumcision is common for Orthodox converts to the religion and others who become more religious later in life.
In Russia, the adult demand is very high because many Jewish men were denied the procedure during the time of the communist Soviet Union, when Jewish religious practice was effectively outlawed. Throughout the country, circumcision was not allowed unless it was required by a medical condition.
Russia’s chief rabbi, Berel Lazar, a Chabad-Lubavitch leader who grew up in Italy and settled in Russia in 1987, remembers a time in his new land when performing a bris required being part of an illegal conspiracy.
“There was a clandestine underground. You’d show up at a designated time, get picked up in a car, blindfolded and taken to an apartment in Moscow where the mohel would wait,” said Lazar, who helped facilitate many of these procedures.
FULL STORY Russia has a full-time surgeon whose only job is circumcising Jewish men
Photo: Rabbi Chaim Danzinger, left, introduces Dr Yeshaya Shafit, second from left, to Jews awaiting circumcision at the synagogue of Rostov-on-Don in Russia, July 27 (Courtesy of the Jewish community of Rostov)
