Legislation To Be Passed By Knesset Banning Chametz In Hospitals

The Knesset is expected to approve a measure forbidding the carrying of chametz into hospitals at the second and third readings.

After the High Court ruled that hospital directors cannot forbid Chametz from being carried into hospitals without legal support, MK Moshe Gafni (UTJ) and several other MKs proposed the measure.

The initial bill, which permitted security officers to search people’s bags for contraband, was scaled back to create the law that is in effect today.

To make it easier to maintain kashrus and Pesach for hospitalized individuals in their hospitals, the law now specifies that “Hospital directors can adopt laws addressing a prohibition or restriction on bringing Chametz into the hospitals.

The hospital director will investigate other options before establishing these rules, considering the patients’ rights and interests, particularly their medical needs.

According to the bill, the hospital director must also post the rules on the institution’s website or the Health Ministry’s website.

At first, Gafni called the regulation “superfluous,” noting that hospitals had operated peacefully and calmly on Pesach for 70 years before the court’s intervention.

The hospital’s director is powerless to intervene, according to the court.

The court’s involvement, why? What made laws necessary? Only with religious concerns can this kind of snide intervention occur.

As Idit Silman resigned in disapproval of the government’s insistence that hospitals permit Chametz access to their surroundings, the Bennett administration was overthrown last year.

Many in the Holocaust fasted on Passover to refrain from consuming chametz, according to Silman. And regrettably, a minister in the State of Israel calls for bringing chametz into our alliance. Beyond the fact that it offends me personally and denigrates coalition partners, the support of this government of unity and consideration offends a sizeable portion—nearly 70%—of the Israeli population.

I owe him some debt of gratitude because he helped me realize—because sometimes we get lost in all of this laborious work—that the Israeli people have specific banners, banners for which people have sacrificed their lives for entire generations, and we, in the current government, will undoubtedly not be doing so.