Page "Israel Shahak" Paragraph 11

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.