Battle of the Bodies

Cities all over Israel last week looked like the setting for a horror movie. In B'nai Brak, near Tel Aviv, 20,000 demonstrators in somber black coats and black hats paraded with banners proclaiming: "Don't cut us up." Posters inside synagogues in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa explained how to prevent hospital attendants from spiriting away the dead: "Stay beside the body every moment." Splashed in white paint across the road near Jerusalem's Hadassah Medical Center was the warning: "Barbaric autopsies must stop."

In a country that has made much of the benefits of contemporary science, the familiar practice of performing an autopsy to aid post-mortem investigation seemed an odd cause for crisis. Yet in one of the bitterest religious controversies in years, bearded Hebrew scholars argued over the application of ancient laws to modern medicine.

Down from the Tree. Most Orthodox Jews consider autopsies generally barred by a passage in the Torah, Deuteronomy 21:22-23, in which Moses says: "And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death, and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but you shall bury him the same day." In other words, even criminals were to be spared the possibility of mutilation by wild animals after their execution. Orthodox extremists interpret that injunction as meaning that any human must be given prompt burial before his body can come to harm, except when an autopsy can help save the life of a person in the immediate area.

Liberal interpreters insist that autopsies can save lives by contributing to medical knowledge. In 1953 Israel's Parliament passed a law authorizing an autopsy when three doctors certify that it is necessary to determine the exact cause of death or for the treatment of another person. Orthodox extremists, who opposed the law in the first place, have been enraged, along with many other Jews, by charges that doctors are conducting widespread post-mortems for pathological research.

In Rehovot last spring, relatives of a farmer whose body had been examined by autopsy ran amuck in a hospital, injuring 20 persons including physicians and nurses. Last October, Israel's two chief rabbis, joined by 356 other religious leaders, called for repeal of the 1953 law. Ever since, the Orthodox dissenters, led by the ultra-rightist Agudath Israel Party, have stepped up a grisly campaign against postmortems. Fortnight ago, they accused a Tel Aviv hospital of stealing the heart of a rabbi's wife after she died.

"It's a Scandal." By last week the uproar had boiled into a potential threat to Premier Levi Eshkol's coalition government. As the result of an Orthodox campaign abroad, Eshkol has been inundated with protests from Jews in 21 countries. At home, police guarded the domiciles of some pathologists who had received threats, and scores of sick were refusing to enter hospitals for fear of dissection if they died.

Whatever its outcome, the controversy highlights the classic struggle between religious doctrine and modern humanitarianism. Once again the modern nation of Israel, which is, after all, a secular state, was being pushed into chaos by what amounted to an extremist religious minority.

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