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The brit boom that made this mohel a cut above

Russian rabbi completes a record 4,500 circumcisions on both babies and adults

August 25, 2011 09:45
Rabbi Gaissinovitch, second left, with one of his newer 'patients'

By

Nissan Tzur

2 min read

He has become known as the Magnificent Mohel, a Chabad rabbi working in Ukraine who this week celebrated an astonishing landmark - 4,500 circumcisions which he has carried out in the last 13 years.

Rabbi Yaacov Gaissinovitch, 35 and a qualified urologist, has been based in Donetsk, Ukraine, since 1998. Moscow-born, he moved with his family to Israel in 1993. The rabbi, who speaks fluent English, Hebrew and Russian, said that he had become ba'al teshuvah - adopting a strictly Orthodox lifestyle - after his move to Israel, and after he attended a Jerusalem yeshivah, had learned how to perform a brit milah.

Speaking on his way to the northern Ukrainian city of Lutsk, to perform yet another brit, Rabbi Gaissinovitch added: "After I specialised under some of Israel's most famous mohels, I myself was ordained to be a mohel.

"A short time later I was asked by the 'Brit Yosef Yitzchak' organisation, which provides circumcision services to any Jew worldwide, to be their emissary in Ukraine. I arrived here in 1998 and started working as the only mohel for Ukraine and Moldova."

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