Ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students demonstrated outside the home of Asheknazic Chief Rabbi Avraham Shapiro yesterday to protest the decision by Shapiro and Sephardic Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliahu to permit the storage of human skin for burn treatment at Israeli hospitals. Shapiro refused to meet with the demonstrators and police, summoned by neighbors, removed them from the premises.
Public opinion was outraged by reports that Israel’s major hospitals did not have sufficient human skin urgently needed to treat 14 soldiers who suffered severe burns in a suicide truck-bomb attack on an Israel Defense Force convoy in south Lebanon on March 10. Twelve soldiers were killed in the attack.
The skin shortage was attributed to a law passed by the Knesset a year ago under intense pressure from the Orthodox political parties forbidding the storage of human skin in skin banks for future emergencies. Israeli doctors reportedly appealed to colleagues in Holland to fly in skin for emergency transplants.
Under the circumstances, the two Chief Rabbis ruled that skin banks were permissable when lives are at stake. But ultra-Orthodox circles denounced their ruling, claiming it would encourage doctors to perform autopsies without the consent of the deceaseds’ next of kin.
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