Collecting Synagogue Pledges 125
This serious concern with the legal validity of Jewish charity pledges is exclusively a matter of Jewish law. Non-Jewish law can have no relevance to it, unless we say that the pledges are also to be considered analogous to the taxes and imposts which the medieval community imposed upon its members(missim v'arnunios). These, too, were collectible by compulsion. In fact, with regard to taxes and imposts, there are indications that occasionally, in some localities, the power of the civil government was called in to enforce payment. This resort to the“secular arm” seems to have been confined to Italy . Joseph Colon(Italy , fifteenth century) says(Responsa#17) that he sees nothing wrong in asking aid from the government in collecting the taxes imposed by the Jewish community upon its members. In fact, he adds, this has been the custom of many(Italian) communities.
Yet, after all, these taxes were to be paid over to the government, and the Jewish community would be endangered if they were not forthcoming It was understandable, then, that the Italian communities might, in desperation, call for secular aid in collecting them. But even in the case of taxes, there seems to be no evidence that the resort to government help was made by Jewish communities in other countries. Certainly this practice is not recorded in the general Codes.
The taxes and imposts were by their nature secular and civil. But a gift to the community for the building of a synagogue was a religious gift which was to remain within the Jewish community. Gentile authorities could not and would not be used to enforce an intra-community religious duty. There is only one exception to this, namely, the situation mentioned in the Mishnah (M. Gittin 9:8) in the case of a man ordered by the Jewish court to give his wife a divorce. If he refused this, gentiles might be asked to compel him to obey the mandate of the Jewish court. But even in that case the divorce is not a fully valid divorce(cf. Tur and Perisha, ad loc.).
Within the Jewish community, and in Jewish law, a pledge to the building of the synagogue is valid and enforceable. The same phrase used in the case of charity gifts is used for synagogue building gifts, namely:“The members of the community may compel each other...”(kofin zeh es zeh, Orah Hayyim 150: 1). To enforce payment, the older communities used the power of excommunication(herem).
When the Russian government forbade the Jewish Cami. nities to employ the herem, then the phrase“to compel, used