In a Zoom meeting of the Conference of European Rabbis (CER) last week during which they discussed issues in their communities related to the coronavirus pandemic, Dutch rabbanim described the shocking behavior of their healthcare system towards coronavirus patients over 60, Arutz Sheva reported. The head of the Amsterdam Beis Din, Rav Eliezer Wolff, and former Chief Rabbi of Amsterdam, Rav Aryeh Ralbag, said at the meeting: “[The Dutch healthcare system] doesn’t provide medical aid, certainly not ventilators, and to our great sorrow we have seen actual opposition, even in the Jewish nursing home. They don’t evacuate patients who require hospitalization, and since we were called in to help, unfortunately, we have lost another four elderly residents. They also speed up their deaths, by giving them high doses of morphine.” The CER rabbanim offered the Dutch authorities to pay the expenses for a special doctor for the Jewish community as well as ventilators but their offer was refused. “It’s extremely saddening to hear that specifically a country considered to be ‘progressive’ is insensitive to the value of life and even determinedly refuses any aid offered by others,” Rav Pinchas Goldschmidt, Chief Rabbi of Moscow and president of the CER, said. There are currently 42,788 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the Netherlands and 5,456 fatalities. A total of 26 fatalities were from Beth Shalom, a Jewish nursing home in Amsterdam with 120 residents. There are about 40,000 Jews in the Netherlands, a country with 17 million people. (YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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