New York (VINNEWS/Rabbi Yair Hoffman) In May 2025, Belgian police entered the home of Rabbi Aharon Eckstein, one of Antwerp's most prominent mohelim, and seized his circumcision instruments. They entered two other locations the same day, one of them in Antwerp's Jewish quarter, the other in the Groen Kwartier district. They demanded lists. Specifically, they demanded the names of every infant circumcised in the prior twelve months.
On Wednesday, May 6, 2026, the Antwerp Public Prosecutor's Office announced the result of that operation. Rabbi Eckstein and a second mohel, an American citizen, have been indicted on charges of "intentional assault or bodily harm with premeditation against minors, as well as the illegal practice of medicine." The two will appear before the pre-trial chamber on June 18, behind closed doors, where the chamber will decide whether to send them to criminal court. The crime, in plain Belgian-prosecutorial language, is performing a bris.
There is a particular bitterness in this prosecution coming from Belgium, of all countries.
Article 14 of the Belgian Constitution guarantees religious liberty. But when Nazi Germany occupied Belgium in May 1940, the Belgian civil service administered and carried out the German order to register every Jew in the country, producing a register of between 65,000 and 70,000 names. Belgian local police rounded up Jews and delivered them to the Dossin Barracks in Mechelen. From Mechelen, between 1942 and 1944, more than 25,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz. Most were murdered on arrival.
It took until 2007 for an official Belgian government study to formally admit that Belgian authorities had failed in their duty and had collaborated with the Nazi machinery of deportation.
That same Belgian state apparatus, the prosecutor's office, the police, the courts, the bureaucratic muscle that once produced lists of Jewish names for German consumption, is now being deployed against mohelim in Antwerp.
One does not need to draw the parallel. The parallel draws itself. But we can draw Belgium's actions to words of the holy prophet Isaiah (5:20):
"Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who present darkness as light and light as darkness, who present bitter as sweet and sweet as bitter." - Because this is exactly what Belgium is doing.
Bris milah is the foundational covenant of the Jewish people, given to Avraham Avinu in Bereishis 17, where Hashem declares it an os bris, a sign of the covenant, l'doroseichem, for all generations. Failure to perform milah carries the penalty of kareis, being cut off from one's people.
The Mishnah in Shabbos teaches that milah is so central that it overrides Shabbos itself, milah docheh es haShabbos, because it is the bris olam, the eternal covenant. It survived the evil Hadrian, who tried to legislate it out of existence and earned himself the Bar Kochba revolt for his trouble.
It survived the evil Antiochus, whose attempt to ban it gave us Chanukah. It survived the Crusades, the Inquisition, the cattle cars from Mechelen, and every other attempt to erase the Jew from his covenant. It will survive the misguided Antwerp Public Prosecutor's Office and the fale protests of the Belgium Foreign Minister that he is not an anti-Semite.
The medical case for the procedure, far from collapsing under modern scrutiny, has steadily strengthened. The American Academy of Pediatrics, after maintaining a neutral position for seventy-five years, formally updated its policy to acknowledge that the health benefits of infant male circumcision outweigh the risks, citing reduced rates of urinary tract infections, penile cancer, and HIV transmission.
African studies on heterosexual HIV transmission were instrumental in that revision. The procedure, performed by an experienced mohel, takes seconds, and infants recover within hours. Mohelim around the world, trained in a tradition reaching back nearly four thousand years, perform this procedure with a safety record that any branch of Western medicine would envy.
The complaint that triggered the May 2025 raids was filed in 2023 by Moshe Aryeh Friedman, an anti-Zionist activist who in 2006 traveled to Tehran to attend Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial conference, where he embraced the Iranian president and was photographed alongside David Duke and other deniers. Antwerp's actual Jewish leadership has publicly described Friedman as "not affiliated with any recognized Jewish institution, synagogue, or communal body" and noted that his "positions are widely rejected" by the 18,000 Jews who actually live in the city.
Belgian prosecutors had a choice. They could have recognized Friedman for what he is, the kind of useful-idiot fringe figure that hostile bureaucracies have always relied on to launder their actions through a Jewish surname. They chose instead to build a criminal case on his complaint.
Israel's Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar rightly called the indictment "a mark of shame upon Belgium," noting that the country has now joined "a short and shameful list, alongside Ireland, of countries that use criminal law to persecute Jews for observing Judaism."
US Ambassador to Belgium Bill White called it "a shameful stain on Belgium" and warned that "Belgium will be thought of now as anti-Semitic by world." Rabbi Menachem Margolin, chairman of the European Jewish Association, was blunter still: Jews should prepare to leave Belgium.
Jews have been performing bris milah in Antwerp since roughly the year 1200. The practice in that city predates the Belgian state itself by more than six centuries. Belgium, founded in 1830, is now criminalizing a covenant older than its borders; older than its constitution; older than the idea of Belgium.
Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis, called it what it is: not health policy but state harassment of Jewish life.
The intellectual machinery driving European anti-circumcision activism did not arise from medical concern. Its modern foundation rests on Jim Bigelow's 1992 book The Joy of Uncircumcising, a text that reads less like medical literature and more like religious propaganda. Bigelow's chapters carry headings such as "To Inform Christians About The True Nature Of Modern-Day Circumcision."
Belgian Foreign Minister Maxime Prévot has insisted that the indictment is purely a matter of medical regulation and that it is "defamatory" to characterize the proceedings as an attack on religious freedom. He pointed out that the complaint was filed by a Jewish individual as though that settles the question. It does not. Throughout history, the most damaging accusations against Jewish communal practice have often been laundered through fringe Jewish figures whose primary qualification was their willingness to be useful. Friedman's well-documented Holocaust denial is not a side detail. It is the tell.
A state that genuinely cared about infant welfare would have, in the years between the 2023 complaint and the 2025 raids, opened a dialogue with the recognized Jewish community of Antwerp. It would have followed the model of France, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands and constructed a workable certification framework. It would not have raided Jewish homes, seized ritual implements, demanded patient lists, and now indicted religious functionaries on charges that carry the moral weight of premeditated bodily harm against children. What Belgium has done instead is take the propaganda apparatus assembled by Bigelow; refined by Hess; and translated into European legislative campaigns; and give it the force of state criminal law. The indictment is not a misunderstanding. It is the predictable terminus of an ideological movement that has; from its 1992 origins; framed Jewish ritual practice as a form of violence against children.
Antwerp's Jewish community survived the cattle cars from Mechelen. The community rebuilt. It produced rabbinical scholarship; schools; kollelim; and mosdos; becoming once again one of the great Jewish centers of Europe. The bris milah performed by Rabbi Eckstein and his colleagues is the same bris milah that was performed in hiding during the war years. It is the same bris milah that has been performed in Antwerp for eight centuries.
A country that took sixty-two years to admit its role in delivering 25,000 Jews to Auschwitz now finds itself; with remarkable speed; prepared to prosecute the rabbis who keep Jewish life going in Antwerp.
The moral arithmetic should trouble any Belgian who is paying attention. It will not trouble the mohelim. They have an older covenant to keep.