Boy awarded $1.2 million in botched circumcision mutilation lawsuit

NEW YORK (AP) -- A clinic has agreed to pay $1.2
million to an 8-year-old immigrant boy who was mutilated
during a botched circumcision five years ago, his lawyer
said.

        The settlement was reached a month after a civil
trial began in state Supreme Court on allegations the boy,
then 3, lost part of his penis during the operation,
according to his attorney, Mark Pruzan.

        The boy and his family, who asked that their names
be withheld, are Russian immigrants who were referred to the
Brook Plaza Surgical Ambulatory Center in Brooklyn by
agencies that help new Jewish immigrants.

        The clinic's attorney, Neil Ptashnik, was quoted in
Wednesday's Daily News as saying that the settlement was
“a business decision” that carried “specifically no
admission of guilt.”

        The boy was one of 16 children who underwent
circumcision at the Brooklyn clinic in July 1990.

        The clinic, a doctor and the rabbi who performed the
operation were being sued for causing “permanent shortening
and disfigurement of the penis.”

        During the trial, experts testified that the
mutilation would make sexual intercourse difficult when the
boy reaches maturity, according to Wednesday's New York
Post.
        Under Jewish religious law, ritual circumcision —
or bris — is performed on 8-day-old boys. But the procedure
was not commonly available in the former Soviet
Union. In addition, some Jewish families
refrained from having their sons circumcised because it
could make them targets of prejudice in communities where
Jews were victims of anti-Semitism.

FOX TELEVISION NEWS AND ASSOCIATED PRESS.
November 30, 1995.