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.