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14 Iyar 5764 - May 5, 2004 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
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NEWS
Poraz: "No Local Authority Tried to Enforce Chometz Law"
By Eliezer Rauchberger

Not a single local authority contacted the Interior Minister with a request to authorize its inspectors to enforce the Chometz Law, Interior Minister Avraham Poraz claimed in a letter he sent to Attorney General Mani Mazuz after MK Rabbi Moshe Gafni told him Poraz did not uphold the Chometz Law.

In his letter Poraz wrote, "Surely you know the Interior Ministry does not have inspectors of its own who are capable of enforcing the Chometz Law due to the diminished resources at my ministry, which recently underwent a drastic cut. I do not believe it would be advisable for me to assign special inspectors from my ministry to this task. In the past as well, when the post of Interior Minister was manned by religious ministers, the Interior Ministry did not assign its own inspectors to this matter, and law enforcement was carried out by authorized inspectors of the local authorities."

The letter, written the day before Pesach, stresses, "So far, until the time of this writing, I have not received a single official request from a local authority to authorize its inspectors to enforce the law. I did receive one letter from the Deputy Mayor of Bat Yam (and not the Mayor himself), but instead of a list of inspectors the municipality would like to approve, the letter was just a general request for clarification."

At the end of his letter Poraz writes, "Granting the inspectors the authority to enforce the law, which carries criminal repercussions, requires preparation and inquiry. Therefore requests to authorize inspectors should have been submitted a reasonable period of time in advance, for the arrival of the Pesach holiday did not come as a surprise to anybody . . . Under these circumstances I do not feel there is any room for criticism with regard to the issue of enforcing the law."

In response MK Gafni said the Interior Minister was dodging the question to avoid giving a real answer. After announcing several weeks before Pesach that he would not enforce the Chometz Law, local council heads did not contact him because they were aware of his stance. Some local heads, such as Jerusalem Mayor Rabbi Uri Lupoliansky, enforced the law independently, using municipal inspectors. Yet none of this exempts the Interior Minister, who declared intentions to transgress the law, for which he must be held accountable, said Rabbi Gafni.

 

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