A municipal court in Jerusalem has caused outrage among the orthodox Jewish community in Israel by making a controversial ruling on the sale of leavened bread. It has overturned the convictions of restaurants and cafes which were fined last year for selling the bread during the Passover celebrations. The law bans the public display of bread made from dough which has been allowed to rise during Pessach. However, Judge Tamar Bar Asher-Zaban has ruled that restaurants should not be considered ‘public places' and were therefore not subject to the law.
The ultra-orthodox Shas party, a member of the governing coalition, condemned the decision and called on the Knesset to appeal the judge's ruling. The minister of religious services ,Yitzhak Cohen, who is a member of Shas, said in response to the ruling that "authorizing the selling of leavened foods on Passover is akin to pointing a gun to Israel's head". Israel’s prime minister Ehud Olmert said the issue "should not be turned into a cultural war."
According to a recent opinion poll, only 18 per cent of Israelis eat leavened food during the Passover holiday. More than two thirds of respondents, however, said they would not eat leavened bread. The poll, carried out among a representative sample of the adult Jewish population in the country, showed that university graduates were less observant when it came to eating leavened food during Passover.
