Getzy Markowitz
Sep 11, 2008
In an imperfect world a famed man can be defamed. A practitioner of benevolence can be terrorized by malevolence. A man of refreshing candor becomes the victim of violent slander. Yet while I knew of the libel against him, I also knew that in good times and not such good times, we Jews inquire of our fellows' welfare. In the most precarious of conditions, we will still be curious of our brethren's well being. Resting my palm upon his arm, and with near sarcastic thoughts, I asked how he was. With his humility, integrity, and sincerity, he responded, "the grace of G-d." A wholehearted answer from a man who walks wholeheartedly with G-d, and who with relentless goodness makes the world a home for G-dliness.
Faced with horrific aspersion, he maintains propriety with devout assertion. With venomous assaults on his person, he continues to be a kind and different kind of person.
But no good deed goes unpunished, and no act of charity goes unresented.
For a politician with presidential ambitions to attack people he knows nothing about is just sad politics. For gentiles to campaign against the gentle Jew, well that's just history. However, for Jews to conform to the same despicable standard is an abomination against the G-d who holds us to higher standards. It sickens me to the core to observe my brethren defying their own core beliefs. How people commanded to be a light unto the world choose to darken it out of their baseless resentment and reprehensible bitterness.
That a liberal union conspired in a libelous plot is hardly shocking. However, when an Orthodox Union joins the faction promulgating heinous erroneous facts, this orthodox Rabbi cannot hold his silence and nor should any other.
The great Rabbi Joseph B. Soleveitchik, himself a victim of trumped-up accusations, would quote his uncle Rabbi Meir Berlin. Rabbi Berlin relayed an answer that Rabbi Chaim of Brisk supplied when asked what the function of a Rabbi was: "To redress the grievances of those who are abandoned and alone, to protect the dignity of the poor, and to save the oppressed from the hands of the oppressor."
What then are Rabbis and leaders to do for people who redress those grievances, who righteously shelter the poor, and who subdue the oppression of others?
Mr. Aaron Rubashkin, like his biblical namesake, loves and pursues peace. For the sake of justice and the sanctification of G-d's name, let us do the same.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
The Assault On Shechita
Nathan Lewin
Dec 15 2004
It was the Wednesday afternoon before Thanksgiving. Downtown offices in Washington had emptied out for the weekend. My secretary buzzed and told me that a Mr. Donald McNeil of The New York Times was on the phone. It was a new name. I had recently dealt with the Times on various Jewish issues including the investigation of AIPAC and the lawsuit we brought against sponsors of terrorism in Israel. I didn't recognize the name McNeil, but I took the call anyway.
McNeil said he was trying to reach AgriProcessors, the kosher meat-processing plant in Iowa, for a statement for a story he was doing. He explained that he had received a video taken 'undercover' by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in the AgriProcessors plant, and that he wanted AgriProcessors' response, if any, to the video.
McNeil then sent me an e-mail in which he said:
The specific allegations from PETA is that the slaughters caught on the tape (and there are more than a dozen of them - I lost count) violates both the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act and Jewish law. The rabbis in Israel to whom they have shown the tape agree that it violated Jewish law, and cited two reasons: 1) a non-Jew made the second cut in the animal's neck to pull out the trachea or esophagus, so the animal did not die only of the shochet's cut, as required, and 2) letting the animals drop out of the drum still alive and thrashing with their entrails hanging out means the animals did not die instantly and painlessly, so the killings were not lawful and the meat is not kosher. It's these allegations I am seeking a reply or comment to from AgriProcessors.
I called Sholom Rubashkin, the principal officer of AgriProcessors (owned by the Rubashkin family), who had no knowledge of this video. I then called McNeil and asked for a copy of the video. He said he had no video-copying machine (and that surprisingly there was none in the Times building), but that he would be willing to show the video to a representative of AgriProcessors at the Times building. He suggested Friday afternoon because he was taking the video to interview someone 'out-of-town' on Friday morning. I told him that no one could come see the video Friday afternoon because Shabbat came in about 4 pm. He said he would make it available Friday morning for a representative of AgriProcessors. I asked him who were the 'rabbis in Israel' PETA was citing for the conclusions regarding Jewish law and that 'the meat is not kosher.' He identified Rabbi Shear Yashuv Cohen, the chief rabbi of Haifa, and Rabbi David Rosen, who had been the chief rabbi of Ireland and is now in charge of interfaith dialogue for the American Jewish Committee.
I asked him, in response, whether PETA had notified him that these two rabbis were well known as vegetarians, who ate no meat of any kind. Rabbi Rosen had even subscribed in print to the proposition that slaughtering an animal for food is an aveirah.
On Thursday - Thanksgiving Day - I consulted with AgriProcessors as to who in New York should accept the invitation to see the video. Rabbi Chaim Kohn, the chief dayan of Khal Adath Yeshurun in New York City, is the rav hamachshir for the Ruashkin plant. He had just returned from South America and was willing to visit the Times on Friday morning. I decided to change my family plans for the weekend and fly to New York to accompany Rabbi Kohn and see the video myself.
McNeil invited us into a small office where we watched the video together. The film began with a title that read 'Kosher Slaughterhouse, Summer 2004.' Then came snippets, each headed 'Incident # ___' with a specific date. The undercover PETA agent had been in the plant for seven weeks, and the film showed selected 'incidents' that he had caught on video. The first showed a steer in a revolving pen receiving a shechita cut from a shochet. A second person approached, after the shechita cut, and made another cut into the slaughtered animal. He then appeared to remove some part from inside the animal. The suggestion that this removal was improper or cruel had not been made by McNeil and, from the video, there was no reason to think that the animal felt any more pain from this removal than an appendicitis victim under anesthesia feels when his appendix is removed.
I knew that animals whose throats are cut by a shochet totally lose consciousness and any sense of pain between two and six seconds after the cut is made. Both Rabbi Kohn and I noted that scientific fact in conversations with McNeil while the film was running. He seemed unpersuaded. 'Look at that animal thrashing around and bellowing,' he said. 'How can you say it is not feeling pain?' The first animal on the video even got to its feet and walked off into a corner before it fell over.
Other 'incidents' selected by PETA for the video showed steer after the shechita cut moving their legs in 'thrashing' motions. Rabbi Kohn told McNeil that animals continue to look as if they are alive even after they can feel nothing because no blood flows to the brain. He explained that a second cut is made after the shochet completes the first cut - which accomplishes the kosher shechita - in order to speed up the bleeding and insure quick loss of consciousness.
In answer to the allegations McNeil had made in the e-mail to me, we told him that the person who followed the shochet and made the second cut was not killing the animal, as he had believed. The only pain was in the eye of the beholder because the animal had lost consciousness from anemia of the brain. When we left, McNeil had no statement from us or from AgriProcessors that satisfied his agenda. We felt we had effectively refuted PETA̓s allegations.
On Saturday night I called the Orthodox Union rabbi who was most centrally involved in kashrut. He was in Jerusalem at the OU convention, and I awakened him at 1:15 a.m. his time. He told me that a New York Times reporter named McNeil had asked to interview him and show him a video, but when he told McNeil that he would not be back in the U.S. before Monday, McNeil said that there was no purpose to an interview because his story would be published in The New York Times on Monday.
On Sunday morning I called Rabbi Shear Yashuv Cohen in Israel. He told me on the phone (and then confirmed in an e-mail) that a purported 'baal teshuvah' named Tal Ronen had shown him a video, refused to tell him where it was taken, and said that he wanted to communicate with the rav hamachshir at the slaughterhouse to tell him how to improve his shechita.
Rabbi Cohen had expressed his opinion based on that representation, without being able to view the shechita personally or more closely than shown on the video. (It now turns out that Tal Ronen is the PETA employee who sent out the PETA video. Rabbi Cohen has written to PETA forbidding use of his name and his opinion.)
Very early Sunday morning I also called Reb Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, executive vice-president of Agudath Israel of America, at the Agudath Israel convention in Connecticut. He immediately recognized the immense threat to shechita presented by PETA's attack on Rubashkin and the need for total Jewish unity in defense of halachic shechta.
There was still one session left in the Agudath Israel convention, and Reb Zwiebel presented to it a strongly worded condemnation of PETA and support for AgriProcessors. The resolution passed unanimously. I e-mailed the Agudath Israel resolution and the facts regarding Rabbi Shear Yashuv Cohen's statement to McNeil at The New York Times. I received no acknowledgment.
But no story appeared in Monday's New York Times. And no story appeared in Tuesday's New York Times. Mr. McNeil had no support for his agenda. He could not write about the PETA video if the people he interviewed uniformly told him there was nothing wrong with the shechita.
And then the Orthodox Union delegation returned from Jerusalem. Wednesday's New York Times reported that McNeil had interviewed two OU rabbis. Although they said that the slaughter on the tape 'ppeared kosher because the shochet checked to make sure he had severed both the trachea and esophagus,' they added what McNeil wanted to hear: '[T]hey were willing to revisit the plant and study whether tearing the throat or letting steers thrash on the ground violated Talmudic proscriptions against cruelty.'
For good measure, the OU officials added that the OU 'prefers a type of pen designed by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in which steers are killed standing up with their weight supported.' They did not bother telling McNeil that the revolving pen used in the Rubashkin plant, in which the steer is turned upside down, results in shechita munachat, which is the only shechita that the rabbinate in Israel accepts and which is closer to the way shechita has been practiced for many centuries.
Now that he had some support for PETA's attack, McNeil wrote an article that appeared in Wednesday's New York Times headlined 'Videos Cited in Calling Kosher Slaughterhouse Inhumane.' McNeil described Rabbi Kohn dismissively as an employee of the AgriProcessors plant - totally ignoring the rabbi's very impressive credentials that I had provided to McNeil at the beginning of our Friday meeting.
McNeil did not mention the Agudath Israel resolution or any other response given by us to PETA's allegation of cruelty. (Nor did he mention that there were grim historical precedents for attacks on shechita. It was the first subject on which Hitler's Nazi Party in 1933 passed laws aimed at Jews. I had loaned McNeil the book on shechita co-authored by my father Dr. Isaac Lewin, z"l, when attacks began being made on it in Europe and the United States. It collected voluminous scientific evidence supporting the humanity of Jewish kosher slaughter and traced Nazi Germany's 'humane' legislation prohibiting shechita.)
And then on Friday, McNeil and the Times followed up with the result of a damaging interview with an OU rabbi who occupied a higher rung in the OU hierarchy. This higher authority told him that the OU 'would ask a major kosher slaughterhouse in Iowa to change the way it kills animals.' The OU official did not say that there was anything halachically wrong with Rubashkin's shechita. He only said - in words that no one could utter without knowing that they were incendiary - that the procedure on the video was 'especially inhumane' and 'generally unacceptable.' Not surprisingly, a PETA official was immediately quoted as saying that this was 'excellent' news.
Public relations on this subject then became a disaster. Although there was not a single kashrut authority who expressed any doubt about the shechita shown on the video and an OU delegation to the plant was impressed with what it saw, the message conveyed to the general public and to the kosher community was that something was halachically amiss at the Rubashkin plant. In an editorial the following week, after a blizzard of reports that AgriProcessors was forced to change its process because of objections from the OU, the Jerusalem Post asserted that the OU had been 'lax' in its kashrut supervision andAgriProcessors had been guilty of 'faulty procedures' in its shechita.
To add insult to injury, when rabbis and certifying authorities sought quickly to issue a unified public statement defending the kashrut of the process followed in the Rubashkin plant, the OU representatives delayed issuance of the statement because they wanted it to include a declaration that removal of the trachea would no longer be practiced.
Whatever one might think of the impact of seeing a trachea or some other portion of an animal's intestines removed soon after shechita, no Orthodox rabbi claimed that this invalidated the shechita.
Nonetheless, the clarifying unified statement was substantially delayed and press accounts condemning Rubashkin were permitted to swell while this debate with the OU rabbis was going on. They urged issuance of a statement that would implicitly condemn the practice that was being followed at the AgriProcessors plant even though it did not impugn the validity of the shechita and some respected rabbinical opinion supported removal of the trachea as halachically desirable to facilitate bleeding and to reduce the absorption of blood into the meat.
It is clear as day that PETA's agenda is to abolish all use of animals for food. PETA activists are going after the AgriProcessors' plant because it is an easy target in their drive to garner emotional support. If they can force a change in the most traditional form of kosher slaughter practiced in the United States, they will move on to eliminate the kosher slaughter practiced in the plants that use the ASPCA restraining pen that the OU assertedly 'prefers' and will find fault with practices in plants that use that pen.
This is, in the words of America's Founding Fathers, a 'first experiment with our liberties' in this country, and it is folly to respond to it in any manner other than with total and unconditional opposition.
There is little doubt that AgriProcessors has been victimized by PETA, which is now riding high and which sent Mr. Rubashkin an arrogant letter on December 6 demanding that he terminate use of the revolving pen (thereby interfering directly with a halachic preference), give his shochtim sensitivity training, require them to shoot animals that move after shechita, prohibit touching a slaughtered animal until it is totally motionless, and hire a named veterinary-medicine professor as a supervisor over kosher slaughter.
AgriProcessors has also been the victim - albeit less intentionally - of Orthodox rabbis who are unwilling or unable to abide by Avtalyon's wise caution: 'Chachamim, hizaharu bedivreichem' (Scholars, be cautious with your words!).
Dec 15 2004
It was the Wednesday afternoon before Thanksgiving. Downtown offices in Washington had emptied out for the weekend. My secretary buzzed and told me that a Mr. Donald McNeil of The New York Times was on the phone. It was a new name. I had recently dealt with the Times on various Jewish issues including the investigation of AIPAC and the lawsuit we brought against sponsors of terrorism in Israel. I didn't recognize the name McNeil, but I took the call anyway.
McNeil said he was trying to reach AgriProcessors, the kosher meat-processing plant in Iowa, for a statement for a story he was doing. He explained that he had received a video taken 'undercover' by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in the AgriProcessors plant, and that he wanted AgriProcessors' response, if any, to the video.
McNeil then sent me an e-mail in which he said:
The specific allegations from PETA is that the slaughters caught on the tape (and there are more than a dozen of them - I lost count) violates both the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act and Jewish law. The rabbis in Israel to whom they have shown the tape agree that it violated Jewish law, and cited two reasons: 1) a non-Jew made the second cut in the animal's neck to pull out the trachea or esophagus, so the animal did not die only of the shochet's cut, as required, and 2) letting the animals drop out of the drum still alive and thrashing with their entrails hanging out means the animals did not die instantly and painlessly, so the killings were not lawful and the meat is not kosher. It's these allegations I am seeking a reply or comment to from AgriProcessors.
I called Sholom Rubashkin, the principal officer of AgriProcessors (owned by the Rubashkin family), who had no knowledge of this video. I then called McNeil and asked for a copy of the video. He said he had no video-copying machine (and that surprisingly there was none in the Times building), but that he would be willing to show the video to a representative of AgriProcessors at the Times building. He suggested Friday afternoon because he was taking the video to interview someone 'out-of-town' on Friday morning. I told him that no one could come see the video Friday afternoon because Shabbat came in about 4 pm. He said he would make it available Friday morning for a representative of AgriProcessors. I asked him who were the 'rabbis in Israel' PETA was citing for the conclusions regarding Jewish law and that 'the meat is not kosher.' He identified Rabbi Shear Yashuv Cohen, the chief rabbi of Haifa, and Rabbi David Rosen, who had been the chief rabbi of Ireland and is now in charge of interfaith dialogue for the American Jewish Committee.
I asked him, in response, whether PETA had notified him that these two rabbis were well known as vegetarians, who ate no meat of any kind. Rabbi Rosen had even subscribed in print to the proposition that slaughtering an animal for food is an aveirah.
On Thursday - Thanksgiving Day - I consulted with AgriProcessors as to who in New York should accept the invitation to see the video. Rabbi Chaim Kohn, the chief dayan of Khal Adath Yeshurun in New York City, is the rav hamachshir for the Ruashkin plant. He had just returned from South America and was willing to visit the Times on Friday morning. I decided to change my family plans for the weekend and fly to New York to accompany Rabbi Kohn and see the video myself.
McNeil invited us into a small office where we watched the video together. The film began with a title that read 'Kosher Slaughterhouse, Summer 2004.' Then came snippets, each headed 'Incident # ___' with a specific date. The undercover PETA agent had been in the plant for seven weeks, and the film showed selected 'incidents' that he had caught on video. The first showed a steer in a revolving pen receiving a shechita cut from a shochet. A second person approached, after the shechita cut, and made another cut into the slaughtered animal. He then appeared to remove some part from inside the animal. The suggestion that this removal was improper or cruel had not been made by McNeil and, from the video, there was no reason to think that the animal felt any more pain from this removal than an appendicitis victim under anesthesia feels when his appendix is removed.
I knew that animals whose throats are cut by a shochet totally lose consciousness and any sense of pain between two and six seconds after the cut is made. Both Rabbi Kohn and I noted that scientific fact in conversations with McNeil while the film was running. He seemed unpersuaded. 'Look at that animal thrashing around and bellowing,' he said. 'How can you say it is not feeling pain?' The first animal on the video even got to its feet and walked off into a corner before it fell over.
Other 'incidents' selected by PETA for the video showed steer after the shechita cut moving their legs in 'thrashing' motions. Rabbi Kohn told McNeil that animals continue to look as if they are alive even after they can feel nothing because no blood flows to the brain. He explained that a second cut is made after the shochet completes the first cut - which accomplishes the kosher shechita - in order to speed up the bleeding and insure quick loss of consciousness.
In answer to the allegations McNeil had made in the e-mail to me, we told him that the person who followed the shochet and made the second cut was not killing the animal, as he had believed. The only pain was in the eye of the beholder because the animal had lost consciousness from anemia of the brain. When we left, McNeil had no statement from us or from AgriProcessors that satisfied his agenda. We felt we had effectively refuted PETA̓s allegations.
On Saturday night I called the Orthodox Union rabbi who was most centrally involved in kashrut. He was in Jerusalem at the OU convention, and I awakened him at 1:15 a.m. his time. He told me that a New York Times reporter named McNeil had asked to interview him and show him a video, but when he told McNeil that he would not be back in the U.S. before Monday, McNeil said that there was no purpose to an interview because his story would be published in The New York Times on Monday.
On Sunday morning I called Rabbi Shear Yashuv Cohen in Israel. He told me on the phone (and then confirmed in an e-mail) that a purported 'baal teshuvah' named Tal Ronen had shown him a video, refused to tell him where it was taken, and said that he wanted to communicate with the rav hamachshir at the slaughterhouse to tell him how to improve his shechita.
Rabbi Cohen had expressed his opinion based on that representation, without being able to view the shechita personally or more closely than shown on the video. (It now turns out that Tal Ronen is the PETA employee who sent out the PETA video. Rabbi Cohen has written to PETA forbidding use of his name and his opinion.)
Very early Sunday morning I also called Reb Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, executive vice-president of Agudath Israel of America, at the Agudath Israel convention in Connecticut. He immediately recognized the immense threat to shechita presented by PETA's attack on Rubashkin and the need for total Jewish unity in defense of halachic shechta.
There was still one session left in the Agudath Israel convention, and Reb Zwiebel presented to it a strongly worded condemnation of PETA and support for AgriProcessors. The resolution passed unanimously. I e-mailed the Agudath Israel resolution and the facts regarding Rabbi Shear Yashuv Cohen's statement to McNeil at The New York Times. I received no acknowledgment.
But no story appeared in Monday's New York Times. And no story appeared in Tuesday's New York Times. Mr. McNeil had no support for his agenda. He could not write about the PETA video if the people he interviewed uniformly told him there was nothing wrong with the shechita.
And then the Orthodox Union delegation returned from Jerusalem. Wednesday's New York Times reported that McNeil had interviewed two OU rabbis. Although they said that the slaughter on the tape 'ppeared kosher because the shochet checked to make sure he had severed both the trachea and esophagus,' they added what McNeil wanted to hear: '[T]hey were willing to revisit the plant and study whether tearing the throat or letting steers thrash on the ground violated Talmudic proscriptions against cruelty.'
For good measure, the OU officials added that the OU 'prefers a type of pen designed by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in which steers are killed standing up with their weight supported.' They did not bother telling McNeil that the revolving pen used in the Rubashkin plant, in which the steer is turned upside down, results in shechita munachat, which is the only shechita that the rabbinate in Israel accepts and which is closer to the way shechita has been practiced for many centuries.
Now that he had some support for PETA's attack, McNeil wrote an article that appeared in Wednesday's New York Times headlined 'Videos Cited in Calling Kosher Slaughterhouse Inhumane.' McNeil described Rabbi Kohn dismissively as an employee of the AgriProcessors plant - totally ignoring the rabbi's very impressive credentials that I had provided to McNeil at the beginning of our Friday meeting.
McNeil did not mention the Agudath Israel resolution or any other response given by us to PETA's allegation of cruelty. (Nor did he mention that there were grim historical precedents for attacks on shechita. It was the first subject on which Hitler's Nazi Party in 1933 passed laws aimed at Jews. I had loaned McNeil the book on shechita co-authored by my father Dr. Isaac Lewin, z"l, when attacks began being made on it in Europe and the United States. It collected voluminous scientific evidence supporting the humanity of Jewish kosher slaughter and traced Nazi Germany's 'humane' legislation prohibiting shechita.)
And then on Friday, McNeil and the Times followed up with the result of a damaging interview with an OU rabbi who occupied a higher rung in the OU hierarchy. This higher authority told him that the OU 'would ask a major kosher slaughterhouse in Iowa to change the way it kills animals.' The OU official did not say that there was anything halachically wrong with Rubashkin's shechita. He only said - in words that no one could utter without knowing that they were incendiary - that the procedure on the video was 'especially inhumane' and 'generally unacceptable.' Not surprisingly, a PETA official was immediately quoted as saying that this was 'excellent' news.
Public relations on this subject then became a disaster. Although there was not a single kashrut authority who expressed any doubt about the shechita shown on the video and an OU delegation to the plant was impressed with what it saw, the message conveyed to the general public and to the kosher community was that something was halachically amiss at the Rubashkin plant. In an editorial the following week, after a blizzard of reports that AgriProcessors was forced to change its process because of objections from the OU, the Jerusalem Post asserted that the OU had been 'lax' in its kashrut supervision andAgriProcessors had been guilty of 'faulty procedures' in its shechita.
To add insult to injury, when rabbis and certifying authorities sought quickly to issue a unified public statement defending the kashrut of the process followed in the Rubashkin plant, the OU representatives delayed issuance of the statement because they wanted it to include a declaration that removal of the trachea would no longer be practiced.
Whatever one might think of the impact of seeing a trachea or some other portion of an animal's intestines removed soon after shechita, no Orthodox rabbi claimed that this invalidated the shechita.
Nonetheless, the clarifying unified statement was substantially delayed and press accounts condemning Rubashkin were permitted to swell while this debate with the OU rabbis was going on. They urged issuance of a statement that would implicitly condemn the practice that was being followed at the AgriProcessors plant even though it did not impugn the validity of the shechita and some respected rabbinical opinion supported removal of the trachea as halachically desirable to facilitate bleeding and to reduce the absorption of blood into the meat.
It is clear as day that PETA's agenda is to abolish all use of animals for food. PETA activists are going after the AgriProcessors' plant because it is an easy target in their drive to garner emotional support. If they can force a change in the most traditional form of kosher slaughter practiced in the United States, they will move on to eliminate the kosher slaughter practiced in the plants that use the ASPCA restraining pen that the OU assertedly 'prefers' and will find fault with practices in plants that use that pen.
This is, in the words of America's Founding Fathers, a 'first experiment with our liberties' in this country, and it is folly to respond to it in any manner other than with total and unconditional opposition.
There is little doubt that AgriProcessors has been victimized by PETA, which is now riding high and which sent Mr. Rubashkin an arrogant letter on December 6 demanding that he terminate use of the revolving pen (thereby interfering directly with a halachic preference), give his shochtim sensitivity training, require them to shoot animals that move after shechita, prohibit touching a slaughtered animal until it is totally motionless, and hire a named veterinary-medicine professor as a supervisor over kosher slaughter.
AgriProcessors has also been the victim - albeit less intentionally - of Orthodox rabbis who are unwilling or unable to abide by Avtalyon's wise caution: 'Chachamim, hizaharu bedivreichem' (Scholars, be cautious with your words!).
A Rabbi's Curious Allegations
Nathan Lewin
Aug 13 2008
In a front-page article asserting that minors had been hired to work in an Iowa kosher meat-packing plant and in an editorial calling the plant the modern equivalent of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, The New York Times joined the media frenzy that has, over the past two months, with very little basis in fact, pilloried AgriProcessors, the country's leading kosher slaughterer and packer of beef, and driven federal and local law-enforcement personnel to threaten dire consequences to its owner and employees.
Insult was heaped on injury when an Orthodox rabbi in Washington, D.C., published an Op-Ed piece in the Times of August 6, claiming the news accounts "call into question whether the food processed in the plant qualifies as kosher."
This nationally published challenge to the kashrut of the AgriProcessors product contradicts the unanimous opinion of highly respected and universally recognized kashrut-certifying agencies that have repeatedly endorsed - even while the media attack was ongoing - the ritual acceptability of that product.
Nonetheless, Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld of Ohev Sholom Synagogue in Washington (of which I have been a member for the past 40 years) - a young rabbi who has achieved great success in reviving, for Jewish residents, a neighborhood that had been abandoned by its Jewish population and has electrified the entire Washington Jewish community with innovative programs - raised "questions" about AgriProcessors' kashrut for the Times's large and influential readership.
Rabbi Herzfeld's column cites the following three grounds for questioning the religious suitability of AgriProcessors' meat:
First, he says "there is precedent for declaring something nonkosher on the basis of how employees are treated." The precedent he cites is that Rabbi Yisroel Salanter, the highly respected founder of the Mussar movement, is "famously believed to have refused to certify a matzo factory as kosher on the grounds that the workers were being treated unfairly."
Rabbi Yisroel Salanter is as gold-plated an authority as one can imagine. If he actually said that unfair treatment of workers renders a product non-kosher, one would have to give that ruling great weight.
Second, Rabbi Herzfeld cites allegations in an affidavit filed by the immigration authorities who raided the AgriProcessors plant in Iowa on May 12 to arrest illegal aliens employed there. He says the affidavit alleges "that an employee was physically abused by a rabbi on the floor of the plant." Rabbi Herzfeld says "this calls into question the reliability and judgment of the rabbi in charge of making sure the food was kosher."
If, in fact, the "rabbi in charge of making sure the food was kosher" did assault an AgriProcessors employee, I would share Rabbi Herzfeld's doubts regarding that rabbi's "reliability and judgment" on issues relating to kashrut.
Third, Rabbi Herzfeld points to the arrest of "two workers who oversaw the poultry and beef division" for "helping illegal immigrants falsify documents." He says that if these supervisors "were willing to break immigration laws, one could reasonably ask whether they would be likely to show the same lack of concern for Jewish dietary laws."
This is a reasonable question if, as one might assume from Rabbi Herzfeld's description of the arrests, the arrested supervisors had any responsibility whatever for the company's compliance with "Jewish dietary laws."
But it takes a little digging beneath the surface of Rabbi Herzfeld's assertions to demonstrate how fallacious they are.
First, the Reb Yisroel Salanter story he describes as "famous" does not appear in any biography of Rabbi Salanter I have been able to find. Rabbi Hillel Goldberg's marvelous history of the Mussar movement, The Fire Within, which has a comprehensive section on Rabbi Salanter, tells only of his having advised his students that, when they were preparing matzos for Passover, they should not overwork or make excessive demands of the female workers who were kneading the dough and otherwise preparing for the matzo baking. That same account appears in a Hebrew volume titled Bikkurei Shai, written by the chief rabbi of Givatayim, Israel.
I e-mailed Rabbi Goldberg, asking him whether he had ever heard that Rabbi Salanter had refused to certify the kashrut of a "matzo factory" because it was unfair to its workers. He replied that the only story on this subject that he knew of was the one that had appeared in his book. He added that it was not likely Rabbi Salanter would ever have given a certification on matzos because he "famously" avoided acting as a community rabbi.
And I myself wonder whether it is not an anachronism for Rabbi Herzfeld to ascribe to the mid-19th century the community practices of today. At a time when all matzos were being hand-baked (and the rabbinic controversy over the kashrut of machine-made matzos was still several decades in the future), what "matzo factory" was seeking the "certification" of Rabbi Salanter?
Second, a closer look is warranted at Rabbi Herzfeld's assertion regarding the case of the abusive "rabbi." Nowhere in the government's affidavit is any accusation reported against any rabbi whose job was "making sure the food was kosher." The term "rabbi" is used interchangeably throughout the affidavit with the term "Hasidic Jew."
Obviously, any employee on the floor of the AgriProcessors plant who had a beard and wore a yarmulke was described by the government's Guatemalan informant as a "rabbi" or "Hasidic Jew."
If one such Jewish employee - with no responsibility for kashrut - abused an employee, it does not "call into question the reliability and judgment of the rabbi in charge of making sure the food was kosher."
Thirdis Rabbi Herzfeld's reliance on the arrest of two supervisors. Would the arrested supervisors - who, one assumes from Rabbi Herzfeld's question, are either certifying rabbis or, at least, chassidic Jews responsible in some manner for kashrut - show the same disdain for Jewish dietary laws as for American immigration law?
Rabbi Herzfeld does not tell us the two arrested supervisors were named Juan Carlos Guerrero-Espinoza and Martin De La Rosa-Loera - supervisors at AgriProcessors whose concern or lack of concern for Jewish dietary laws is as irrelevant as one can imagine.
At a time of the year when we recall that vicious reports to authorities led to the destruction of the Temple, Rabbi Herzfeld might take a more careful look at the grounds for his public allegations.
Aug 13 2008
In a front-page article asserting that minors had been hired to work in an Iowa kosher meat-packing plant and in an editorial calling the plant the modern equivalent of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, The New York Times joined the media frenzy that has, over the past two months, with very little basis in fact, pilloried AgriProcessors, the country's leading kosher slaughterer and packer of beef, and driven federal and local law-enforcement personnel to threaten dire consequences to its owner and employees.
Insult was heaped on injury when an Orthodox rabbi in Washington, D.C., published an Op-Ed piece in the Times of August 6, claiming the news accounts "call into question whether the food processed in the plant qualifies as kosher."
This nationally published challenge to the kashrut of the AgriProcessors product contradicts the unanimous opinion of highly respected and universally recognized kashrut-certifying agencies that have repeatedly endorsed - even while the media attack was ongoing - the ritual acceptability of that product.
Nonetheless, Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld of Ohev Sholom Synagogue in Washington (of which I have been a member for the past 40 years) - a young rabbi who has achieved great success in reviving, for Jewish residents, a neighborhood that had been abandoned by its Jewish population and has electrified the entire Washington Jewish community with innovative programs - raised "questions" about AgriProcessors' kashrut for the Times's large and influential readership.
Rabbi Herzfeld's column cites the following three grounds for questioning the religious suitability of AgriProcessors' meat:
First, he says "there is precedent for declaring something nonkosher on the basis of how employees are treated." The precedent he cites is that Rabbi Yisroel Salanter, the highly respected founder of the Mussar movement, is "famously believed to have refused to certify a matzo factory as kosher on the grounds that the workers were being treated unfairly."
Rabbi Yisroel Salanter is as gold-plated an authority as one can imagine. If he actually said that unfair treatment of workers renders a product non-kosher, one would have to give that ruling great weight.
Second, Rabbi Herzfeld cites allegations in an affidavit filed by the immigration authorities who raided the AgriProcessors plant in Iowa on May 12 to arrest illegal aliens employed there. He says the affidavit alleges "that an employee was physically abused by a rabbi on the floor of the plant." Rabbi Herzfeld says "this calls into question the reliability and judgment of the rabbi in charge of making sure the food was kosher."
If, in fact, the "rabbi in charge of making sure the food was kosher" did assault an AgriProcessors employee, I would share Rabbi Herzfeld's doubts regarding that rabbi's "reliability and judgment" on issues relating to kashrut.
Third, Rabbi Herzfeld points to the arrest of "two workers who oversaw the poultry and beef division" for "helping illegal immigrants falsify documents." He says that if these supervisors "were willing to break immigration laws, one could reasonably ask whether they would be likely to show the same lack of concern for Jewish dietary laws."
This is a reasonable question if, as one might assume from Rabbi Herzfeld's description of the arrests, the arrested supervisors had any responsibility whatever for the company's compliance with "Jewish dietary laws."
But it takes a little digging beneath the surface of Rabbi Herzfeld's assertions to demonstrate how fallacious they are.
First, the Reb Yisroel Salanter story he describes as "famous" does not appear in any biography of Rabbi Salanter I have been able to find. Rabbi Hillel Goldberg's marvelous history of the Mussar movement, The Fire Within, which has a comprehensive section on Rabbi Salanter, tells only of his having advised his students that, when they were preparing matzos for Passover, they should not overwork or make excessive demands of the female workers who were kneading the dough and otherwise preparing for the matzo baking. That same account appears in a Hebrew volume titled Bikkurei Shai, written by the chief rabbi of Givatayim, Israel.
I e-mailed Rabbi Goldberg, asking him whether he had ever heard that Rabbi Salanter had refused to certify the kashrut of a "matzo factory" because it was unfair to its workers. He replied that the only story on this subject that he knew of was the one that had appeared in his book. He added that it was not likely Rabbi Salanter would ever have given a certification on matzos because he "famously" avoided acting as a community rabbi.
And I myself wonder whether it is not an anachronism for Rabbi Herzfeld to ascribe to the mid-19th century the community practices of today. At a time when all matzos were being hand-baked (and the rabbinic controversy over the kashrut of machine-made matzos was still several decades in the future), what "matzo factory" was seeking the "certification" of Rabbi Salanter?
Second, a closer look is warranted at Rabbi Herzfeld's assertion regarding the case of the abusive "rabbi." Nowhere in the government's affidavit is any accusation reported against any rabbi whose job was "making sure the food was kosher." The term "rabbi" is used interchangeably throughout the affidavit with the term "Hasidic Jew."
Obviously, any employee on the floor of the AgriProcessors plant who had a beard and wore a yarmulke was described by the government's Guatemalan informant as a "rabbi" or "Hasidic Jew."
If one such Jewish employee - with no responsibility for kashrut - abused an employee, it does not "call into question the reliability and judgment of the rabbi in charge of making sure the food was kosher."
Thirdis Rabbi Herzfeld's reliance on the arrest of two supervisors. Would the arrested supervisors - who, one assumes from Rabbi Herzfeld's question, are either certifying rabbis or, at least, chassidic Jews responsible in some manner for kashrut - show the same disdain for Jewish dietary laws as for American immigration law?
Rabbi Herzfeld does not tell us the two arrested supervisors were named Juan Carlos Guerrero-Espinoza and Martin De La Rosa-Loera - supervisors at AgriProcessors whose concern or lack of concern for Jewish dietary laws is as irrelevant as one can imagine.
At a time of the year when we recall that vicious reports to authorities led to the destruction of the Temple, Rabbi Herzfeld might take a more careful look at the grounds for his public allegations.
The Fight For Kosher Slaughter
Dr. Isaac Lewin And The Fight For Kosher Slaughter
Nathan Lewin
Fifty years ago the battle over a federal humane slaughter law came to a close. On August 27, 1958, Congress adopted, which established the "use of humane methods of slaughter of livestock as a policy of the United States - forbidding the federal government from purchasing meat slaughtered by inhumane methods and giving the Department of Agriculture inspection authority in this area.
The law explicitly recognized that one of two humane methods of slaughtering livestock was shechita, defined in the statute as "slaughtering in accordance with the ritual requirements of the Jewish faith or any other religious faith that prescribes a method of slaughter whereby the animal suffers loss of consciousness by anemia of the brain caused by the simultaneous and instantaneous severance of the carotid arteries with a sharp instrument.
Public Law 85-765 was not limited to the shechita cut itself. Section 6 exempted "from the terms of this Act not only "ritual slaughter but also "the handling or other preparation of livestock for ritual slaughter.
My father, zichrono livrocho, was the principal spokesman for the kosher-observant community in crafting and successfully battling for this total protection of shechita and the steps needed to position the animal for shechita - which, in the 1950s, routinely required "shackling and hoisting that enraged the humane societies and was attacked by Jews who thought that halacha should bend to more modern standards.
On my father's 13th yahrzeit, the 28th of Av, which comes this year on August 29, the full story deserves to be told.
The battle to defend shechita in the United States against the campaign of America's "humane societies began in 1956, when Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota (who was to be Lyndon Johnson's vice president and the Democratic presidential nominee in 1968) introduced a law that prohibited any method of slaughter of livestock that had not "first been rendered insensible by mechanical, electrical, chemical, or other means determined by the Secretary [of Agriculture] to be rapid, effective, and humane.
The law went on to declare that it was not to apply "to any individual who is duly authorized by an ordained rabbi of the Jewish religious faith to serve as a shector, while such individual is engaged in the slaughtering of livestock or poultry in accordance with the practice of such religious faith.
The secular agencies that defended Judaism in the United States against anti-Semitism were content with this explicit exemption for shechita. My father immediately recognized it was a trap - a first step in the campaign that had historically been waged against Jewish ritual slaughter. Hitler's Nazi government immediately banned shechita in April 1933 as "inhumane, but it is difficult in the post-World War II world to take that step directly. Instead, shechita is first treated legislatively as an "exemption from the requirement of humaneness imposed on the rest of society. In a second phase, that "exemption is challenged and removed.
In England, a humane-slaughter law had been enacted in 1933 with an exemption for shechita. In December 1954 legislation was introduced in the House of Commons to remove the 1933 exemption, and that amendment was vigorously supported by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and other moralists in England's humane societies. They were not ashamed to declare in their literature that "for the last twenty-one years gross cruelty has been perpetrated on cattle slaughtered in Great Britain for Jewish and Moslem consumption, and that by deliberate permission of the law.
On May 10, 1956 - then representing only the Agudas Harabanim - my father traveled to Washington to testify before Sen. Humphrey's Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry. He said the organization was "firmly opposed to the present measure because by implication it brands the Jewish ritualistic method of slaughter - shechita - as not humane. Such implication is indeed offensive, and has no basis in fact. He and Rabbi Michael Munk, zl, who supported his testimony, provided Humphrey with several hundred expert endorsements of the humanity of shechita provided in their book on the subject.
Humphrey was persuaded by the testimony and by personal meetings with my father. He replied on the record that it was not his intention "to brand [shechita] as inhumane, but to list it as one of the humane methods. He added that "this Senator would never permit any such insinuation to exist in the record, or in the legislation, such as you have felt was in this legislation. He expressed gratitude for the "amazing documentation supporting shechita my father had provided and said it would be included in the hearing record.
My father then went on a campaign to educate the Jewish community agencies on the subject. And in April 1957, he was able to testify before a House subcommittee on the subject on behalf not only of the Agudas Harabanim and all other national Orthodox groups but also as representative of the American Jewish Congress, the Jewish Labor Committee, the Synagogue Council of America, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, and the organization that was then the "umbrella spokesman for American Jewish interests - the National Community Relations Advisory Council (NCRAC).
He expressed opposition to a series of House bills modeled on the legislation originally introduced in the Senate. He said that they "give a completely false impression of the Jewish kosher method of slaughtering animals and may become the basis of restriction against one of the most important precepts of the Jewish faith, thus endangering a primary civil liberty - freedom of religion.
The House members were persuaded and the bills were amended, as the Senate bills had been, to recognize explicitly that shechita was humane. Approximately 15 years later, a group of kindness-to-animal advocates sued to declare the shechita provision unconstitutional as favoritism to religion. A three-judge federal court explicitly relied on the fact that it had been scientifically proved, to the satisfaction of Congress, to be a humane method for its conclusion that it was not religious favoritism. My father's prescience saved shechita in the United States.
But there is more to the story. My father recognized that it was not enough to protect the shechita cut itself. The humane societies had targeted the "shackling and hoisting of livestock that was, at the time, the routine method of positioning cattle for shechita (because the animal could not be slaughtered while lying on the ground in blood of others that had preceded it). The "Weinberg pen that encases the animal and rotates it for shechita munachat (the only kind viewed as permissible by the Chief Rabbinate in Israel) was still in its early stages, was not yet fully approved by the Department of Agriculture, and was extraordinarily expensive.
My father fought the moralists again on this phase of the shechita battle. There were many spokesmen from secular Jewish agencies who thought it unwise to take a position that would offend modern thinkers who believe today's rabbis should incorporate modern standards into a system that has existed for thousands of years. They were initially willing to accept an explicit prohibition in the law against shackling and hoisting or, in 1958, a law that would only prohibit restrictions that "in any way hinder the religious freedom of any person or group to slaughter and prepare for slaughter of livestock in conformity with the practices and requirements of his religion.
Representing this time only Orthodox organizations, my father returned in April 1958 to Washington to testify before a Senate subcommittee chaired by a hostile Sen. Stuart Symington (D-MO). My father said that permitting shackling and hoisting only if the Department of Agriculture found that it was "in conformity with the practices and requirements of religion "would make the Jewish method of slaughtering animals virtually impossible in the United States.
He quoted an Agriculture Department letter to the subcommittee that expressed doubts regarding the Weinberg pen. The letter also indicated that shackling and hoisting - then used universally in the relatively small kosher slaughterhouses in the United States - would have to be "in compliance with a method designated and approved by the Secretary.
Symington said he had to rush out to a dentist's appointment but noted that humane slaughter laws had been approved in many countries "despite your opposition. He wanted to know when "your method of slaughtering animals first started. My father replied that it was about 3,500 years ago. Symington then noted that science had made substantial strides in anesthesia in the past 50 years and asked my father, "Couldn't there have been some change in the 2,500 years with respect to animals that would be acceptable to your church?
My father replied, "We strongly believe that the divine precepts and divine commands of God have not yet been surmounted nor surpassed by any human knowledge.
Symington rushed off to care for his teeth, but he found time to support an amendment to the Humane Slaughter law that gave full protection to the pre-shechita handling of animals - including shackling and hoisting. Credit for the legal protection of shechita in the United States in the past half-century belongs to my father. Yehi Zichro Boruch.
Nathan Lewin is a Washington attorney who has appeared before the Supreme Court in behalf of many Orthodox causes.
Nathan Lewin
Fifty years ago the battle over a federal humane slaughter law came to a close. On August 27, 1958, Congress adopted, which established the "use of humane methods of slaughter of livestock as a policy of the United States - forbidding the federal government from purchasing meat slaughtered by inhumane methods and giving the Department of Agriculture inspection authority in this area.
The law explicitly recognized that one of two humane methods of slaughtering livestock was shechita, defined in the statute as "slaughtering in accordance with the ritual requirements of the Jewish faith or any other religious faith that prescribes a method of slaughter whereby the animal suffers loss of consciousness by anemia of the brain caused by the simultaneous and instantaneous severance of the carotid arteries with a sharp instrument.
Public Law 85-765 was not limited to the shechita cut itself. Section 6 exempted "from the terms of this Act not only "ritual slaughter but also "the handling or other preparation of livestock for ritual slaughter.
My father, zichrono livrocho, was the principal spokesman for the kosher-observant community in crafting and successfully battling for this total protection of shechita and the steps needed to position the animal for shechita - which, in the 1950s, routinely required "shackling and hoisting that enraged the humane societies and was attacked by Jews who thought that halacha should bend to more modern standards.
On my father's 13th yahrzeit, the 28th of Av, which comes this year on August 29, the full story deserves to be told.
The battle to defend shechita in the United States against the campaign of America's "humane societies began in 1956, when Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota (who was to be Lyndon Johnson's vice president and the Democratic presidential nominee in 1968) introduced a law that prohibited any method of slaughter of livestock that had not "first been rendered insensible by mechanical, electrical, chemical, or other means determined by the Secretary [of Agriculture] to be rapid, effective, and humane.
The law went on to declare that it was not to apply "to any individual who is duly authorized by an ordained rabbi of the Jewish religious faith to serve as a shector, while such individual is engaged in the slaughtering of livestock or poultry in accordance with the practice of such religious faith.
The secular agencies that defended Judaism in the United States against anti-Semitism were content with this explicit exemption for shechita. My father immediately recognized it was a trap - a first step in the campaign that had historically been waged against Jewish ritual slaughter. Hitler's Nazi government immediately banned shechita in April 1933 as "inhumane, but it is difficult in the post-World War II world to take that step directly. Instead, shechita is first treated legislatively as an "exemption from the requirement of humaneness imposed on the rest of society. In a second phase, that "exemption is challenged and removed.
In England, a humane-slaughter law had been enacted in 1933 with an exemption for shechita. In December 1954 legislation was introduced in the House of Commons to remove the 1933 exemption, and that amendment was vigorously supported by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and other moralists in England's humane societies. They were not ashamed to declare in their literature that "for the last twenty-one years gross cruelty has been perpetrated on cattle slaughtered in Great Britain for Jewish and Moslem consumption, and that by deliberate permission of the law.
On May 10, 1956 - then representing only the Agudas Harabanim - my father traveled to Washington to testify before Sen. Humphrey's Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry. He said the organization was "firmly opposed to the present measure because by implication it brands the Jewish ritualistic method of slaughter - shechita - as not humane. Such implication is indeed offensive, and has no basis in fact. He and Rabbi Michael Munk, zl, who supported his testimony, provided Humphrey with several hundred expert endorsements of the humanity of shechita provided in their book on the subject.
Humphrey was persuaded by the testimony and by personal meetings with my father. He replied on the record that it was not his intention "to brand [shechita] as inhumane, but to list it as one of the humane methods. He added that "this Senator would never permit any such insinuation to exist in the record, or in the legislation, such as you have felt was in this legislation. He expressed gratitude for the "amazing documentation supporting shechita my father had provided and said it would be included in the hearing record.
My father then went on a campaign to educate the Jewish community agencies on the subject. And in April 1957, he was able to testify before a House subcommittee on the subject on behalf not only of the Agudas Harabanim and all other national Orthodox groups but also as representative of the American Jewish Congress, the Jewish Labor Committee, the Synagogue Council of America, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, and the organization that was then the "umbrella spokesman for American Jewish interests - the National Community Relations Advisory Council (NCRAC).
He expressed opposition to a series of House bills modeled on the legislation originally introduced in the Senate. He said that they "give a completely false impression of the Jewish kosher method of slaughtering animals and may become the basis of restriction against one of the most important precepts of the Jewish faith, thus endangering a primary civil liberty - freedom of religion.
The House members were persuaded and the bills were amended, as the Senate bills had been, to recognize explicitly that shechita was humane. Approximately 15 years later, a group of kindness-to-animal advocates sued to declare the shechita provision unconstitutional as favoritism to religion. A three-judge federal court explicitly relied on the fact that it had been scientifically proved, to the satisfaction of Congress, to be a humane method for its conclusion that it was not religious favoritism. My father's prescience saved shechita in the United States.
But there is more to the story. My father recognized that it was not enough to protect the shechita cut itself. The humane societies had targeted the "shackling and hoisting of livestock that was, at the time, the routine method of positioning cattle for shechita (because the animal could not be slaughtered while lying on the ground in blood of others that had preceded it). The "Weinberg pen that encases the animal and rotates it for shechita munachat (the only kind viewed as permissible by the Chief Rabbinate in Israel) was still in its early stages, was not yet fully approved by the Department of Agriculture, and was extraordinarily expensive.
My father fought the moralists again on this phase of the shechita battle. There were many spokesmen from secular Jewish agencies who thought it unwise to take a position that would offend modern thinkers who believe today's rabbis should incorporate modern standards into a system that has existed for thousands of years. They were initially willing to accept an explicit prohibition in the law against shackling and hoisting or, in 1958, a law that would only prohibit restrictions that "in any way hinder the religious freedom of any person or group to slaughter and prepare for slaughter of livestock in conformity with the practices and requirements of his religion.
Representing this time only Orthodox organizations, my father returned in April 1958 to Washington to testify before a Senate subcommittee chaired by a hostile Sen. Stuart Symington (D-MO). My father said that permitting shackling and hoisting only if the Department of Agriculture found that it was "in conformity with the practices and requirements of religion "would make the Jewish method of slaughtering animals virtually impossible in the United States.
He quoted an Agriculture Department letter to the subcommittee that expressed doubts regarding the Weinberg pen. The letter also indicated that shackling and hoisting - then used universally in the relatively small kosher slaughterhouses in the United States - would have to be "in compliance with a method designated and approved by the Secretary.
Symington said he had to rush out to a dentist's appointment but noted that humane slaughter laws had been approved in many countries "despite your opposition. He wanted to know when "your method of slaughtering animals first started. My father replied that it was about 3,500 years ago. Symington then noted that science had made substantial strides in anesthesia in the past 50 years and asked my father, "Couldn't there have been some change in the 2,500 years with respect to animals that would be acceptable to your church?
My father replied, "We strongly believe that the divine precepts and divine commands of God have not yet been surmounted nor surpassed by any human knowledge.
Symington rushed off to care for his teeth, but he found time to support an amendment to the Humane Slaughter law that gave full protection to the pre-shechita handling of animals - including shackling and hoisting. Credit for the legal protection of shechita in the United States in the past half-century belongs to my father. Yehi Zichro Boruch.
Nathan Lewin is a Washington attorney who has appeared before the Supreme Court in behalf of many Orthodox causes.
Friday, September 12, 2008
No Hekhsher, Not Tzedek!
By: Rabbi Avi Shafran
According to Chazal (Nedarim, 40a), ideas that on the surface seem entirely constructive can in truth be quite the opposite. A contemporary case in point is the effort calling itself “Hekhsher Tzedek,” or “Justice Certification.”
Conceived by the rabbi of a Conservative congregation, and now endorsed by that movement’s rabbinic arm, the “Hekhsher”’s promoters insist that it is not really a hekhsher, or kashrus certification, at all. It is, rather, an “enhancement” of such certification, an indication that a kosher product was also “made in compliance with a set of social justice criteria.”
Needless to say, a kashrus certifier certainly has a right, and in many cases a responsibility, to ensure that a food-producing company or food-service establishment seeking its certification hew not only to the laws of kashrus but to other requirements of halacha. Thus, a bakery that is open on Shabbos, a slaughterhouse that violates the dictates of tza’ar ba’alei chayim, or a restaurant where tzenius is lacking would all be rightfully subject to a machshir’s insistence that the business bring itself within the bounds of halacha.
And, of course, there are “social justice” issues, too, like the forbiddance of an employer to withhold workers’ wages, that are of no less concern to halacha. Tellingly, though, only that category of extra-kashrus concerns and animal welfare seem of interest to the purveyors of the planned “Hekshsher Tzedek.”
Brave New “Just And Sustainable World”
More telling still is that even in the realm of “social justice,” the advocates of the proposed non-heksher hekhsher seek less to ensure compliance with halacha than to supplant it with a broader social agenda of their own choosing.
Which explains why those advocates turned to a “social research” firm, KLS Research and Analytics – whose self-described mission is to effect “greater corporate accountability and, ultimately, a more just and sustainable world” – to create the document setting down the conditions for awarding the “Hekhsher Tzedek.”
The resulting seven pages lay down a “strict set of standards” relating to “Wages and Benefits; Employee Health and Safety/Relations/Training; Product Development; Corporate Transparency and Integrity; and Environmental Impact.” Evaluation of companies, it explains, will be based on data collected from, among other sources, “governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations, and the media.”
“Non-governmental organizations” would conceivably include groups like “People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals,” or PETA; and “the media” – well, we all know what sort of exemplars of responsibility that word encompasses .
Unintended Consequences and Mischief-Making
We American Jews are fortunate to live in a malchus that is not only one of chessed but of laws. And among those laws are more than a few that govern many of the areas into which the “Hekhsher Tzedek” seeks to insinuate itself. Federal and state labor regulations cover wages, safety, animal welfare, employees’ rights, and much else. There are, moreover, secular laws covering areas that halacha may not explicitly address. In those cases, the principle of dina de’malchusa dina requires Jews to respect the temporal law, and its violation perforce constitutes a violation of halacha.
Thus, laws, halachic and otherwise, are already in place to ensure proper treatment of animals, workers, consumers and the environment; and ignoring any of them renders a company subject to punitive action by federal and state agencies. To the extent that an envisioned new “badge of approval” simply reiterates those requirements, it is superfluous. And where it aims to go further, beyond halachic and/or governmental strictures, it overreaches, and can serve only to make mischief.
The proposed “ethical” certification, in fact, would require or favor (and, puzzlingly, only for producers of kosher food, not any other businesses) things that the law does not require, like an unspecified number of paid vacation days, pension plans, “positive relations with unions,” “proactive efforts to have a diverse workforce,” non-mandatory environmental management systems, and much else. However nice those things may sound, they have no place as the subjects of even a quasi-hechsher. What is more, their implementation – with companies paying not only for the new requirements but for the new certification itself – would raise already high prices for kosher food, driving some consumers away from kosher food and likely putting companies out of business (and their employees, of course, out of work – see opening paragraph).The Plot Thickens
Finally, according to the document, “essential” for any company seeking to qualify for the “Hekhsher Tzedek” will be its “willingness to enter into dialogue with the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism (USCJ), the Rabbinical Assembly (RA), and their partners.”
Those, of course, would be the congregational and rabbinic groups, respectively, of the Jewish movement that has, through its creative “halachic process,” effectively erased entire pesukim from the Torah, and led the vast majority of its synagogues’ members – our precious Jewish brothers and sisters – to abandon entire portions of the Shulchan Aruch with “rabbinic approval.”
And that is the movement now presenting itself as the arbiter of a “higher standard” for companies producing or selling kosher food.
Here, of course, lies the key to the matter. Only a naïf could miss the real motivation for the Conservative movement’s recent front-burnering of its “Justice Certification.” It is a bald attempt to portray itself as something other than dwindling and desperate. The movement’s loss of members over past years and its embarrassing jettisoning of yet another passuk of late (this most recent one sacrificed to contemporary society’s increasing approval of “alternate lifestyles”) have left it with a well-deserved intensified identity crisis.
As Gary Rosenblatt, the editor of the New York Jewish Week, politely put it: “This is just the kind of moral issue that could inspire and reinvigorate Conservative Jewry, which has lost members and been divided internally for the last few years… .”
Whether the project has the ability, despite all else, to inspire and invigorate the Conservative movement is uncertain, to put it gently. What is clear, though, is that the movement sensed, and seized, a golden opportunity in the media’s relentless assault on Agriprocessors, the embattled kosher slaughterhouse and meatpacker based in Postville, Iowa.
Blood in the Water
The Conservative rabbi who conceived of the ethical “enhancement” of kashrus was inspired by a report in the Forward in 2006 that portrayed the Agriprocessors plant as rife with harassment, abuse and bribery. Although after his own visit to the plant the rabbi admitted to The New York Times that “We weren’t able to verify everything” that the Forward had reported, he insisted that he had discovered “indignities.” He cited lower wages than those offered by unionized meatpacking plants, safety training only in English, and a single option health-care plan for $50 a week per family.Although the “abuse” seemed something less than truly abusive, the sharks, so to speak, smelled blood in the water. Before long, the Conservative rabbinic arm endorsed the “Justice Certification.”
Then, this past May, Agriprocessors was the subject of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid during which hundreds of illegal immigrant workers were arrested. Some of those in custody leveled accusations of mistreatment of workers, and the Iowa Labor Commissioner charged that the company had violated child labor laws. Agriprocessors vociferously denied knowingly employing any minor, and pointed out that it had terminated four underage employees in 2007 who, it was determined, had submitted false documentation. And when the Iowa Labor Commissioner’s Office told the company that it knew of other underage workers at the plant, Agriprocessors requested that the workers be identified so that their employment could be terminated, but the Commissioner’s Office refused to do so.
Coming, though, after Agriprocessors was accused by PETA in 2004 of cruelty to animals (a post-shechita practice that was discontinued after objections to it were raised) and the Forward story, the raid set the media – and interested others – to salivating. In mere weeks, the “strict set of standards” document was publicly issued.The Bottom Line
At least to the degree to which it might stimulate the Conservative laity to focus on actual kashrus, we might take some heart in all the publicity the “Hekhsher Tzedek” has garnered. Few consumers already dedicated to kashrus, though, will be impressed with the proposed seal of Conservative “Justice Certification” approval; they will recognize it as neither a certification nor just. They know that halacha standards are already of concern to kashrus certifiers, and that any “enhancement” of kashrus – in particular at the hands of a Jewish movement that has shown little respect for even clear and established halacha itself – represents not a raising of Jewish standards, but rather a reaching for some semblance of a Jewish high ground, a cynical attempt to stake a claim in a realm until now uncharted by its new intrepid explorers. It is not unconceivable that the “Heckhsher Tzedek” seal, should it ever come to appear on a product, might even serve to repel consumers – at least those who recognize it for what it isn’t, and what it is.
According to Chazal (Nedarim, 40a), ideas that on the surface seem entirely constructive can in truth be quite the opposite. A contemporary case in point is the effort calling itself “Hekhsher Tzedek,” or “Justice Certification.”
Conceived by the rabbi of a Conservative congregation, and now endorsed by that movement’s rabbinic arm, the “Hekhsher”’s promoters insist that it is not really a hekhsher, or kashrus certification, at all. It is, rather, an “enhancement” of such certification, an indication that a kosher product was also “made in compliance with a set of social justice criteria.”
Needless to say, a kashrus certifier certainly has a right, and in many cases a responsibility, to ensure that a food-producing company or food-service establishment seeking its certification hew not only to the laws of kashrus but to other requirements of halacha. Thus, a bakery that is open on Shabbos, a slaughterhouse that violates the dictates of tza’ar ba’alei chayim, or a restaurant where tzenius is lacking would all be rightfully subject to a machshir’s insistence that the business bring itself within the bounds of halacha.
And, of course, there are “social justice” issues, too, like the forbiddance of an employer to withhold workers’ wages, that are of no less concern to halacha. Tellingly, though, only that category of extra-kashrus concerns and animal welfare seem of interest to the purveyors of the planned “Hekshsher Tzedek.”
Brave New “Just And Sustainable World”
More telling still is that even in the realm of “social justice,” the advocates of the proposed non-heksher hekhsher seek less to ensure compliance with halacha than to supplant it with a broader social agenda of their own choosing.
Which explains why those advocates turned to a “social research” firm, KLS Research and Analytics – whose self-described mission is to effect “greater corporate accountability and, ultimately, a more just and sustainable world” – to create the document setting down the conditions for awarding the “Hekhsher Tzedek.”
The resulting seven pages lay down a “strict set of standards” relating to “Wages and Benefits; Employee Health and Safety/Relations/Training; Product Development; Corporate Transparency and Integrity; and Environmental Impact.” Evaluation of companies, it explains, will be based on data collected from, among other sources, “governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations, and the media.”
“Non-governmental organizations” would conceivably include groups like “People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals,” or PETA; and “the media” – well, we all know what sort of exemplars of responsibility that word encompasses .
Unintended Consequences and Mischief-Making
We American Jews are fortunate to live in a malchus that is not only one of chessed but of laws. And among those laws are more than a few that govern many of the areas into which the “Hekhsher Tzedek” seeks to insinuate itself. Federal and state labor regulations cover wages, safety, animal welfare, employees’ rights, and much else. There are, moreover, secular laws covering areas that halacha may not explicitly address. In those cases, the principle of dina de’malchusa dina requires Jews to respect the temporal law, and its violation perforce constitutes a violation of halacha.
Thus, laws, halachic and otherwise, are already in place to ensure proper treatment of animals, workers, consumers and the environment; and ignoring any of them renders a company subject to punitive action by federal and state agencies. To the extent that an envisioned new “badge of approval” simply reiterates those requirements, it is superfluous. And where it aims to go further, beyond halachic and/or governmental strictures, it overreaches, and can serve only to make mischief.
The proposed “ethical” certification, in fact, would require or favor (and, puzzlingly, only for producers of kosher food, not any other businesses) things that the law does not require, like an unspecified number of paid vacation days, pension plans, “positive relations with unions,” “proactive efforts to have a diverse workforce,” non-mandatory environmental management systems, and much else. However nice those things may sound, they have no place as the subjects of even a quasi-hechsher. What is more, their implementation – with companies paying not only for the new requirements but for the new certification itself – would raise already high prices for kosher food, driving some consumers away from kosher food and likely putting companies out of business (and their employees, of course, out of work – see opening paragraph).The Plot Thickens
Finally, according to the document, “essential” for any company seeking to qualify for the “Hekhsher Tzedek” will be its “willingness to enter into dialogue with the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism (USCJ), the Rabbinical Assembly (RA), and their partners.”
Those, of course, would be the congregational and rabbinic groups, respectively, of the Jewish movement that has, through its creative “halachic process,” effectively erased entire pesukim from the Torah, and led the vast majority of its synagogues’ members – our precious Jewish brothers and sisters – to abandon entire portions of the Shulchan Aruch with “rabbinic approval.”
And that is the movement now presenting itself as the arbiter of a “higher standard” for companies producing or selling kosher food.
Here, of course, lies the key to the matter. Only a naïf could miss the real motivation for the Conservative movement’s recent front-burnering of its “Justice Certification.” It is a bald attempt to portray itself as something other than dwindling and desperate. The movement’s loss of members over past years and its embarrassing jettisoning of yet another passuk of late (this most recent one sacrificed to contemporary society’s increasing approval of “alternate lifestyles”) have left it with a well-deserved intensified identity crisis.
As Gary Rosenblatt, the editor of the New York Jewish Week, politely put it: “This is just the kind of moral issue that could inspire and reinvigorate Conservative Jewry, which has lost members and been divided internally for the last few years… .”
Whether the project has the ability, despite all else, to inspire and invigorate the Conservative movement is uncertain, to put it gently. What is clear, though, is that the movement sensed, and seized, a golden opportunity in the media’s relentless assault on Agriprocessors, the embattled kosher slaughterhouse and meatpacker based in Postville, Iowa.
Blood in the Water
The Conservative rabbi who conceived of the ethical “enhancement” of kashrus was inspired by a report in the Forward in 2006 that portrayed the Agriprocessors plant as rife with harassment, abuse and bribery. Although after his own visit to the plant the rabbi admitted to The New York Times that “We weren’t able to verify everything” that the Forward had reported, he insisted that he had discovered “indignities.” He cited lower wages than those offered by unionized meatpacking plants, safety training only in English, and a single option health-care plan for $50 a week per family.Although the “abuse” seemed something less than truly abusive, the sharks, so to speak, smelled blood in the water. Before long, the Conservative rabbinic arm endorsed the “Justice Certification.”
Then, this past May, Agriprocessors was the subject of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid during which hundreds of illegal immigrant workers were arrested. Some of those in custody leveled accusations of mistreatment of workers, and the Iowa Labor Commissioner charged that the company had violated child labor laws. Agriprocessors vociferously denied knowingly employing any minor, and pointed out that it had terminated four underage employees in 2007 who, it was determined, had submitted false documentation. And when the Iowa Labor Commissioner’s Office told the company that it knew of other underage workers at the plant, Agriprocessors requested that the workers be identified so that their employment could be terminated, but the Commissioner’s Office refused to do so.
Coming, though, after Agriprocessors was accused by PETA in 2004 of cruelty to animals (a post-shechita practice that was discontinued after objections to it were raised) and the Forward story, the raid set the media – and interested others – to salivating. In mere weeks, the “strict set of standards” document was publicly issued.The Bottom Line
At least to the degree to which it might stimulate the Conservative laity to focus on actual kashrus, we might take some heart in all the publicity the “Hekhsher Tzedek” has garnered. Few consumers already dedicated to kashrus, though, will be impressed with the proposed seal of Conservative “Justice Certification” approval; they will recognize it as neither a certification nor just. They know that halacha standards are already of concern to kashrus certifiers, and that any “enhancement” of kashrus – in particular at the hands of a Jewish movement that has shown little respect for even clear and established halacha itself – represents not a raising of Jewish standards, but rather a reaching for some semblance of a Jewish high ground, a cynical attempt to stake a claim in a realm until now uncharted by its new intrepid explorers. It is not unconceivable that the “Heckhsher Tzedek” seal, should it ever come to appear on a product, might even serve to repel consumers – at least those who recognize it for what it isn’t, and what it is.
A Response to Governor Culver (IA)
Governor Culver in his Op-Ed piece urged Agriprocessors to ‘take the high road’ and join the family of responsible businesses in Iowa. We believe that we are indeed on course to take the “high road” as we shall explain.
Agriprocessors moved to the state of Iowa two decades ago precisely because the company had a vision: to create a source of kosher meat that could supply the nation’s growing demand for kosher foods with healthy, good quality, and reasonably priced meat. Agriprocessors chose to locate its plant in Iowa because of what the State had and continues to offer. Iowa offers honest, hard-working people, - people who work for our company, and people who supply the company with products and services.
With the grace of G-d, Agriprocessors flourished in the state of Iowa while benefitting the citizens of Iowa. It provided jobs to many hundreds of people and stimulated economic growth not only in Postville but throughout the State. Agriprocessors is very much a part of Iowa’s dream, creating a “value added product” from the great beef the Iowa for export nationwide.
Agriprocessors fully subscribes to the Governor’s call to begin to take the “high road” and join the family of responsible businesses in Iowa since it wholeheartedly believes that it is doing precisely that. In just the past few months, it has taken a number of important steps which certainly fulfill that challenge.
While the Governor’s first bill in office was to raise the minimum wage from $6.25 per hour to $7.25 an hour, Agriprocessors has raised its minimum starting wage from $7.25 per hour to $10.00 per hour (for workers with skills). The company has also instituted affordable and quality health care for all of its workers, another prime concern of the Governor.
Agriprocessors regrets that some of its employees may have used fraudulent documents to lie about their age. Agriprocessors has been in contact with the Iowa Department of Labor ever since it raised the issue early this year. It repeatedly asked the Department to advise it of underage workers who may have fraudulently presented documents to work at the plant. The Department did its own audit in April and did not find any underage workers. The company policy is clear: “No one under 18 may be employed at the plant.” When it did learn of several underage workers in the plant, they were immediately dismissed.
Agriprocessors hired Jim Martin, a former US attorney in Missouri, as its new compliance officer to ensure that the company is in complete compliance with all federal and state regulations. It has implemented safety training sessions for all of its supervisors and for all of its workers. The company means it: Safety is its number one concern. Everyone at Agriprocessors knows that, its officers, employees on the line, and supervisors.
Agriprocessors hired a former OSHA official to monitor its compliance with all federal and state safety requirements. Agriprocessors is a modern and safe place to work, as anyone who has visited the plant recently can plainly see. It has also hired an experienced staffing company to do its hiring, and which is voluntarily using the new federal e-Verify system.
The water treatment problem that the Governor raises was a problem years ago not only for the company’s plant but also for another business as well. While the other company cut and ran, Agriprocessors stayed the course and invested heavily in a high technology water treatment plant that is a model of environmental friendliness and is the envy of companies across the country and, indeed, throughout the world. Ironically, Agriprocessors never received any credit for this bold action.
We are pleased to invite the Governor to visit the plant and to meet with our leadership and to see the truth firsthand. In such a meeting, we would be delighted to hear the Governor’s suggestions as to how we can further improve to fulfill the Governor’s challenge to us. In addition to meeting with us, the Governor should meet with members of our community, the Mayor of Postville, with our happy employees, and our supervisors and our compliance officers.
In the end, we are certain that the Governor will see firsthand that our plant is anything but a “jungle” and that when all of the bitterness of the last few months is taken out of the equation, that we are indeed on course to being on an even “higher road.”
Agriprocessors moved to the state of Iowa two decades ago precisely because the company had a vision: to create a source of kosher meat that could supply the nation’s growing demand for kosher foods with healthy, good quality, and reasonably priced meat. Agriprocessors chose to locate its plant in Iowa because of what the State had and continues to offer. Iowa offers honest, hard-working people, - people who work for our company, and people who supply the company with products and services.
With the grace of G-d, Agriprocessors flourished in the state of Iowa while benefitting the citizens of Iowa. It provided jobs to many hundreds of people and stimulated economic growth not only in Postville but throughout the State. Agriprocessors is very much a part of Iowa’s dream, creating a “value added product” from the great beef the Iowa for export nationwide.
Agriprocessors fully subscribes to the Governor’s call to begin to take the “high road” and join the family of responsible businesses in Iowa since it wholeheartedly believes that it is doing precisely that. In just the past few months, it has taken a number of important steps which certainly fulfill that challenge.
While the Governor’s first bill in office was to raise the minimum wage from $6.25 per hour to $7.25 an hour, Agriprocessors has raised its minimum starting wage from $7.25 per hour to $10.00 per hour (for workers with skills). The company has also instituted affordable and quality health care for all of its workers, another prime concern of the Governor.
Agriprocessors regrets that some of its employees may have used fraudulent documents to lie about their age. Agriprocessors has been in contact with the Iowa Department of Labor ever since it raised the issue early this year. It repeatedly asked the Department to advise it of underage workers who may have fraudulently presented documents to work at the plant. The Department did its own audit in April and did not find any underage workers. The company policy is clear: “No one under 18 may be employed at the plant.” When it did learn of several underage workers in the plant, they were immediately dismissed.
Agriprocessors hired Jim Martin, a former US attorney in Missouri, as its new compliance officer to ensure that the company is in complete compliance with all federal and state regulations. It has implemented safety training sessions for all of its supervisors and for all of its workers. The company means it: Safety is its number one concern. Everyone at Agriprocessors knows that, its officers, employees on the line, and supervisors.
Agriprocessors hired a former OSHA official to monitor its compliance with all federal and state safety requirements. Agriprocessors is a modern and safe place to work, as anyone who has visited the plant recently can plainly see. It has also hired an experienced staffing company to do its hiring, and which is voluntarily using the new federal e-Verify system.
The water treatment problem that the Governor raises was a problem years ago not only for the company’s plant but also for another business as well. While the other company cut and ran, Agriprocessors stayed the course and invested heavily in a high technology water treatment plant that is a model of environmental friendliness and is the envy of companies across the country and, indeed, throughout the world. Ironically, Agriprocessors never received any credit for this bold action.
We are pleased to invite the Governor to visit the plant and to meet with our leadership and to see the truth firsthand. In such a meeting, we would be delighted to hear the Governor’s suggestions as to how we can further improve to fulfill the Governor’s challenge to us. In addition to meeting with us, the Governor should meet with members of our community, the Mayor of Postville, with our happy employees, and our supervisors and our compliance officers.
In the end, we are certain that the Governor will see firsthand that our plant is anything but a “jungle” and that when all of the bitterness of the last few months is taken out of the equation, that we are indeed on course to being on an even “higher road.”
The Second Cut
NY Times, PETA Claim Of Law Prohibiting Second Cut - A SIMPLE LIE!
Dear Julia:
I was terribly disappointed in your piece this morning that included a quote from me, which makes me wonder whether the sense of fairness you tried to display in your previous piece was somehow missing here.
For starters, there are several inaccuracies: You write: “Under the regulations, a “second cut” in an animal’s throat can be made only in exceptional cases by rabbis or under their supervision. These cuts are sometimes made to speed blood flow from the animals.” There is nothing in the regulations that mentions exceptional cases and in fact if you had read the regulations, you would see a blanket permission for the second cut.
Here are the Direct quotes from the regulations on the subject of a second cut:Inspection program personnel are to verify that after the ritual slaughter cut and any additional cut to facilitate bleeding, no dressing procedure (e.g., head skinning, leg removal, ear removal, horn removal, opening hide patterns), is performed until the animal is insensible.
Inspection program personnel are not to interfere in any manner with the preparation of the animal for ritual slaughter, including the positioning of the animal, or the ritual slaughter cut and any additional cut to facilitate bleeding.
Secondly: Whoever told you that Agriprocessors agreed to suspend the second cut when it was never demanded of them and the procedure continues?
Third: You conveniently omitted my quote that the second cut in fact only hastens the elimination of any pain or suffering, if there is any?
Finally, this story would have been more appropriate to point out that PETA’s activities were illegal and that the USDA used the strong term that Agriprocessors is “in full compliance.” Why not tell the truth?
Menachem LubinskyPresident & CEO, LUBICOM Marketing Consulting, which represents Agriprocessors andEditor-in-Chief, Kosher Today
The Full Story
Dear Julia:
I was terribly disappointed in your piece this morning that included a quote from me, which makes me wonder whether the sense of fairness you tried to display in your previous piece was somehow missing here.
For starters, there are several inaccuracies: You write: “Under the regulations, a “second cut” in an animal’s throat can be made only in exceptional cases by rabbis or under their supervision. These cuts are sometimes made to speed blood flow from the animals.” There is nothing in the regulations that mentions exceptional cases and in fact if you had read the regulations, you would see a blanket permission for the second cut.
Here are the Direct quotes from the regulations on the subject of a second cut:Inspection program personnel are to verify that after the ritual slaughter cut and any additional cut to facilitate bleeding, no dressing procedure (e.g., head skinning, leg removal, ear removal, horn removal, opening hide patterns), is performed until the animal is insensible.
Inspection program personnel are not to interfere in any manner with the preparation of the animal for ritual slaughter, including the positioning of the animal, or the ritual slaughter cut and any additional cut to facilitate bleeding.
Secondly: Whoever told you that Agriprocessors agreed to suspend the second cut when it was never demanded of them and the procedure continues?
Third: You conveniently omitted my quote that the second cut in fact only hastens the elimination of any pain or suffering, if there is any?
Finally, this story would have been more appropriate to point out that PETA’s activities were illegal and that the USDA used the strong term that Agriprocessors is “in full compliance.” Why not tell the truth?
Menachem LubinskyPresident & CEO, LUBICOM Marketing Consulting, which represents Agriprocessors andEditor-in-Chief, Kosher Today
The Full Story
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