Israel Shahak - Alleged Telephone Incident

Alleged Telephone Incident

In 1965, Shahak wrote a letter to Ha'aretz which, according to Dan Rickman, writing in The Guardian in 2009, was the genesis for "he currently major debate within and outside Israel about Orthodox Jewish attitudes to non-Jews". In the letter Shahak claimed to have witnessed an Orthodox Jewish man refusing to allow his telephone to be used to call an ambulance for a non-Jew because it was the Jewish Sabbath. He also wrote that members of the rabbinical court of Jerusalem confirmed that the man was correct in his understanding of Jewish law, and that they backed this assertion by quoting from a passage from a recent compilation of law. The issue was subsequently taken up in Israeli newspapers and The Jewish Chronicle, leading to significant publicity. According to Israeli historian Tom Segev, Maariv asked for the opinion of the minister of religious affairs, Dr. Zerah Warhaftig, who did not refute the rabbinical ruling, but quoted from traditional Jewish sources according to which Jewish doctors had saved the lives of non-Jews on the Sabbath, although they were not required to do so."

In 1966, Immanuel Jakobovits, who later became Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of Britain and the Commonwealth, disputed the veracity of Shahak's story, and alleged that when challenged to substantiate his claim, Shahak eventually had been forced to admit that the Orthodox Jew he claimed to have witnessed "simply did not exist." Jakobovits wrote that "The whole incident had been fabricated in true Protocols style", and cited a lengthy responsum by Isser Yehuda Unterman, the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel at the time, who stated that, "the Sabbath must be violated to save non-Jewish life no less than Jewish lives."

The following year Zeev Falk wrote that though he disapproved of the Shahak's "invented case", it had a positive outcome. "While I dissociate myself from the methods of action of Dr. Israel Shahak, who invented the case of a Gentile who was not given treatment on the Sabbath, it was this fiction that led Chief Rabbi Unterman to issue a ruling permitting the violation of the Sabbath in order to save the life of a Gentile".

Shahak repeated his account in the opening chapter of his 1994 book, Jewish History, Jewish Religion, stating that "Neither the Israeli, nor the diaspora, rabbinical authorities ever reversed their ruling that a Jew should not violate the Sabbath in order to save the life of a Gentile. They added much sanctimonious twaddle to the effect that if the consequence of such an act puts Jews in danger, the violation of the Sabbath is permitted, for their sake."

Writing in 2008, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach stated "From the beginning the story was curious. What prohibition could there possibly be in allowing someone else to use one's phone on the Sabbath?" He cited Eli Beer, chief coordinator of Israel's volunteer ambulance service, who "oversees 1,100 medical volunteers, approximately 60 percent of whom are Orthodox," as stating:

If someone would say we won't save a non-Jewish life on the Sabbath, he is a liar. If he is Jewish, Christian, or Muslim we save everyone's life on any day of the year, including the Sabbath and Yom Kippur, and I have done so myself. Indeed, as an orthodox Jew it is my greatest honor to save the life of a non-Jew, and I would violate any of the Jewish holy days to do so.