Israeli Dog Unmolested

“There was no talk of reincarnation, a lawyer has never been mentioned, either now or 20 years ago, and there was no stoning. Such inventions are a kind of blood libel, and we wonder why the inventor of the story did not continue to describe how we collected the blood of the dog to make our matzah.”
 — The secretariat of the Monetary Affairs Court in Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim neighborhood released a statement denying reports in the Israeli newspaper Maariv earlier this month that a dog had been sentenced to death by stoning because plaintifs and judges thought that it was a gilgul, or the reincarnated soul, of a secular lawyer who had filed a civil suit against the court 20 years ago. Maariv has retracted the original story and apologized.