Jewish Sharia Law in Los Angeles the Mesira Telmudic Teaching

In a Los Angeles courtroom, the federal justice system is colliding with one of the most vexing areas of Jewish law.

Rabbi Moshe Zigelman, 64, already has spent two years in jail in a tax-fraud and money-laundering case that also saw the grand rabbi of the Spinka Chasidic sect sent to prison. The scheme involved soliciting large tax-deductible donations and secretly funneling most of the money back to the donors.

Now federal prosecutors are threatening more jail time for Zigelman, the Spinka rebbe’s personal secretary, who is refusing to testify and implicate others before a grand jury.

Zigelman’s lawyers say that his religious convictions do not allow him to testify. They point to the laws of mesira, the Talmudic prohibition against a Jew informing on another Jew to non-Jewish authorities. In modern terms, it’s a sort of Jewish no-snitching rule.

The concept of mesira, which literally means “delivery,” dates back to periods when governments often were hostile to Jews and delivering a Jew to the authorities could lead to an injustice and even death.

The rules of mesira still carry force within the Orthodox world, owing both to the inviolability of the concept’s talmudic origins and the insular nature of many Orthodox communities. But they are also the subject of debate over whether the prohibition applies in a modern democracy that prides itself on due process and civil rights.

“The question of the parameters of the prohibition of mesira remains a dispute about how to apply it in a just democracy,” said Rabbi Michael Broyde, a law professor at Emory University.

Rabbinical authorities are split on the issue, depending in large part on where they sit on the Orthodox spectrum. The issue is so sensitive that some religious leaders are reluctant to publicly discuss it, with many recognizing that the topic has the potential to adversely affect the way Jews are perceived