King Charles III was circumcised by Jewish medical doctor and rabbi

The royal family tradition of hiring a mohel (one who performs Jewish ritual circumcision) to circumcise the infant boys dates back to Queen Victoria.

By World Israel News Staff

King Charles III, who gained the title Thursday immediately following the passing of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, was circumcised by a medical doctor and rabbi who was also a mohel – a Jew trained in the practice of brit milah, the “covenant of circumcision” – the Jewish Press reported.

Then-Prince Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten hired Rabbi Jacob Snowman to circumcise their first-born son, Philip Arthur George, who was born on November 14, 1948.

In fact, the royal family tradition of hiring a mohel to circumcise the infant boys dates back to Queen Victoria, according to the report. The tradition ended in 1982, however, with the birth of Charles’s grandson, Prince William, as his mother Diana chose not to circumcise her child.

Rabbi Snowman was not the only member of his family to deal with the royals, the article notes. His brother, Emanuel Snowman, married into a family of jewelers. The Wartzski family, who for generations produced jewelry for the royals, including the wedding bands worn by Prince William and his wife Kate and by Charles and his second wife, Camilla.

His paternal grandmother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, was honored with the title “Righteous Among the Nations” for saving a Jewish family during the Holocaust. She is buried at the Mount of Olives’ Church of Mary Magdalene.

In 1994, then-Prince Charles was in Israel for a Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial event honoring Princess Alice, and in 2016, he attended former Israeli president and prime minister Shimon Peres’s funeral. Neither visit was in official capacity.

“Every week in synagogue we have prayed for her welfare, well-being and wisdom, and she never let us down,” Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom Ephraim Mirvis stated upon the passing of the queen.

Indeed, on December 6, 2019, Charles delivered a speech titled, The special and precious connection between Jewish community and the Crown, at a reception in Buckingham Palace. “The connection between the Crown and our Jewish Community is something special and precious. I say this from a particular and personal perspective because I have grown up being deeply touched by the fact that British synagogues have, for centuries, remembered my Family in your weekly prayers. And as you remember my Family, so we too remember and celebrate you,” he said.