“This shameful bill passed controversially in the Knesset, is responsible for many premature deaths in dangerously ill people who avoided medical treatment out of fear of the draconian regulations allowing their body to be dissected after death.”

A week before Pesach of 1967, with the country on edge in the run-up to the Six Day War, five thousand people gathered on Bnei Brak’s Rechov Rabbi Akiva to protest a national scandal.

Days before, 43-year-old Rebbetzin Rachel, wife of one of the city’s prominent rabbis, Rav Gedaliah Nadel, had passed away during heart surgery at the Tel HaShomer hospital. During her levayah, it was discovered that the hospital had failed to return the deceased’s heart, and had retained it for research purposes.

By Israeli law, the hospital had only erred in not securing the signatures of three authorized doctors; beyond that the family had no legal right to protest. But the callous treatment of the deceased woman outraged public feeling, already inflamed by the long-running scandal of “nituchei meisim” — the country’s systematic practice of autopsies in violation of halachah.

As pashkevilim of the period thundered, patients desperately avoided secular-run medical centers such as the capital’s Hadassah Hospital for fear that doctors would perform an autopsy or even harvest their organs for research after their death.

As the large crowd was addressed by some of Israel’s most prominent rabbanim, there was suddenly a graphic illustration of those fears.

An elderly man fainted, and as he was wheeled to the ambulance, he began screaming frantically, “No, no! Not the hospital!”