It may have passed under the radar for those who missed the Hazon Food Conference, but Hekhsher Tzedek, the ethical certification seal for the kosher food industry, has now evolved into Magen Tzedek. The name change serves a number of purposes. Aside from easing arguments over spelling, dropping the term hekhsher would better enable the seal to be applied to products that aren’t food. The main motivation behind the name change however, is to allow the seal to coexist with other rabbinic kosher seals. Orthodox supervision organizations such as the OU were none to happy at the thought of a rival Conservative hekhsher telling them that their meat was kosher. In the meantime, it seemed like the founder of Hekhsher Tzedek, Rabbi Morris Allen, was spending half of his time explaining that the new seal was not intended to be a rival kashrut certification but an ethical seal. Thankfully, after discussions with the OU the parties have agreed on a new name. You can read more about Magen Tzedek in the official press release, or in this article from the JTA.
From the Hazon Food Conference:
Transforming Kosher Meat in America
Three large meat companies, under the supervision of a few national religious organizations, produce the vast majority of the kosher meat consumed in the United States. These companies slaughter animals in industrial slaughterhouses far removed from major urban centers. The scandal at the Agriprocessors plant in Iowa has forced us to re-examine our modern system of industrial kosher meat production. How do notions of transparency, sustainability, affordability, consumer choice, and ethics fit into our kosher meat production system and whose responsibility is it to determine and enforce these standards? Join some of the most influential players in the world of kosher meat to discuss their visions for the future of kosher meat production in America.
Tuesday night at Yeshiva University, a crowd of more than five hundred came to watch their best and brightest duke it out over the connection between kashrut and ethics…and by duke it out I mean have a calm and respectful conversation based on Torah and tradition. “These are the giants of the generation.” Ari Hart, a member of the Uri L’Tzedek leadership team, said of the panelists.
The panel has received a lot of attention. The New York Times covered it, and an article on the YU website gives a run down of the conversation and the basic ethical conundrum. What it doesn’t do is give any sense of the soaring heights of rhetorical fervor reached by Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz of Uri L’Tzedek (though the Times did refer to his delivery as “Jeremiah-like” for whatever that’s worth).
While his fellow rabbis were in conversation about what the halakhic connection is between ethics and kashrut, the dictum not to assume guilt before it’s been proven, and the need to let secular authorities do their job, Rabbi Yanklowitz delivered a ten minute oratory complete with lectern thumping, gesticulation, and repetitive phrasing that filled the room with such intensity, I think it broke the microphones. It could have come hot off the press from Obama’s speech writing team, and it got the crowd going wild.
If you’ll be in New York City tonight, go and check out this panel at Yeshiva University’s Weissberg Center, where Orthodox leaders will get together to discuss the movement’s response to ethics and kashrut. The panel is at 7 pm, and will include Shmuly Yanklowitz of Uri L’Tzedek. See The Jew and The Carrot’s interview with Ari Hart to get prepped.
If you can’t make it to the panel in person, check out the live webcast at Mogulus (thanks to Larry Lennhoff for his comment and to Ari Weiss for contacting us).
Over at Jewschool, Borough Park-born blogger “chillul Who?” covers the email chain letter promoting a petition by supporters of the Rubashkin family, condemning (denying?) the events as the “War on Kosher.” As of almost 1 pm today, it has over 10,500 signatures.
But more interesting to me than the content of the petition are the comments of the signatories. Ranging from the persecuted panic to the phenominally ignorant to the poetically philosophical, the thousands of pages contain jewels of understanding of a world almost totally un-JCarrot. Enter the dramatis personae:
The conspiracy theorists:
Name not displayed, New York
What started out as a PETA tactic to stop the slaughtering of as many animals as they could, became a government witch-hunt far disproportionate to any alleged crimes committed.
The clever:
Raphael Chudaitov, New York
DONT HATE THE PLAYER, HATE THE GAME.
Right after the raid on Agriprocessors, there was a large public outcry about the immigrant workers who were not only facing prosecution, but also left without any income source and struggling to make rent in the sleepy town of Postville, Iowa.
According to Ben Harris at the JTA, hard times have hit the rest of the Agriprocessors community, including the Rabbis who worked for the company as shochtim (kosher slaughterers), their families, and the network of Jewish services (a synagogue, kosher market, etc.) that sprang up over the last decade to support the growing number of observant Jews in town. According to Jeff Abbas, a local Postville radio worker, the majority of Agirprocessors’ rabbis haven’t been paid for 10 weeks.
What do you get when you cross Friday night with with more than 350 ethically-aware, foodie Jews? Shabbat dinner at Hazon’s Food Conference! The harder question is, what do you feed them?
Bay Area resident, Roger Studley, is currently working to create a kosher, free-range/humanely-slaughtered meat business on the West Coast. In the meantime, he is busy coordinating the schecting and preparation of nearly 20 heritage turkeys, which – if all goes as planned – will be served to conference participants on Shabbat. As far as I know (and as far as my little bit of researching/asking around has revealed), this is the first time a Jewish conference has ever sourced its own kosher meat directly from a local farmer – aside from Hazon’s food conference last year, of course!
The Jew & The Carrot got in touch with Roger to find out how planning was going, and hear his opinion on Agriprocessors, the Jewish vegetarian debate, and his vision for the future of kosher food.
Read the interview below the jump and join the fun by registering for Hazon’s Food Conference here.
When it rains it pours. A little less than 6 months after the raid on Agriprocessors, the serious fallout – of the “going out of business sale” variety – has begun. Last week the company was sued for $10 million dollars, and former CEO Sholom Rubashkin was arrested.
Now, according to The Des Moines Register, the company is running, but just barely, with a meager 35 cars in a parking lot that generally holds hundreds and fairly dismal prospects for recovery in the near future. Read the full story below the jump. And, kosher keepers – has the lack of production impacted what’s available on the shelves yet? Where are you getting your kosher meat from these days?
Pictured: Sholom Rubashkin
(hat tip to Failed Messiah)
Agriprocessors’ former CEO, Sholom Rubashkin, was arrested this morning in Iowa. The charge? Knowingly conspiring to harbor illegal immigrants at Agriprocessors. (Not necessarily “surprising” news, but pretty darn important.)
The arrest comes on the heels of the company being fined $10 million dollars yesterday for wage violations – mostly for illegal reductions taken out of workers’ paychecks.
Ironically, just this morning during my blissful “30 minutes with a paper copy of The New York Times” ritual on the subway, I read that, “No federal charges have been brought against senior managers and owners of Agriprocessors.”
Well there goes that.
Rubashkin will make an initial appearance in federal court for the Northern District of Iowa this afternoon. How the kosher community, and particularly the OU responds remains to be seen. Read the full story in the Iowa Independent and below the jump…
Thanks to Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster for this guest post. Rabbi Kahn-Troster is Director of Education and Outreach for Rabbis for Human Rights North America.
In Judaism, confession is a group experience. On Yom Kippur, we stand together as a community and in one voice confess our collective sins before God. Amidst the various lists of transgressions, the Al Chet prayer contains a line that deals with sustenance: Al chet she chatanu liphanecha b’ma’achal u’mishteh, literally: “For the sin we have sinned before You through food and drink.” “Food and drink” is often translated as “gluttony,” which narrows the sin to the idea that we are confessing to having eaten more than our share, wantonly, without thinking. I think the original translation is helpful—we have committed sins through all kinds of acts of eating and drinking, but also through the way our food is produced, distributed, and wasted.
Back in May, with Agriprocessors in the middle of its downward spiral (how far down it goes, nobody knows…), it seemed like there were people in Postville who still had some respect and appreciation for the jobs brought by the slaughterhouse, and felt their town was being unfairly picked on. On their blog Postville Voices, they wrote “We’ve had enough of every organization with an agenda cynically misrepresenting our town and workplace to further their own ends,” and added that, “There is one thing we do know — the people that run Agriprocessors are good, decent, honest people and we trust that they have acceptable answers.”
The Associated Press reported that in response to the raid on Agriprocessors kosher meat plant last May (and the legal fallout surrounding it): “an organization of Orthodox Jewish rabbis announced that it was forming a task force to devise Jewish principles and ethical guidelines on the kosher food industry.”
According to the story, published in the NY Times:
The group, the Rabbinical Council of America, said it would publish the results in a guide. Rabbi Asher Meir, an author and expert in Jewish business ethics, will lead the task force.
Over the next four weeks, Jews will be sitting down to together to more celebratory meals in succession than they likely do the entire rest of the year. Many of those meals will be kosher, and many more will include meat as either a main or side course – or both. Meanwhile, Jewish people around the country are also beginning to think differently about the meat that they eat, in light of the immigration raid on the kosher meat plant, Agriprocessors earlier this year, and of all the transgressions related to the conventional meat industry (CAFOs, hormones and antibiotics, worker abuse, etc). For some people, the easiest response is to go vegetarian. But for people who choose not to go the veggie route, what are the options?
We asked some of the leading voices of the New Jewish food movement to answer the question: “If I choose to eat meat over the high holidays, what is the number one thing I should consider?”
Read their responses below – and share your own.
The fact that an announcement about the OU threatening to pull its certification from Agriprocessors came out during the month of Elul is too poignant to overlook.
Shortly after Iowa’s attorney general filed criminal charges against Agriprocessors’ owner, Aaron Rubashkin (for child labor violations), The Orthodox Union decided that unless management is replaced very soon (the quote from Rabbi Menachem Genack claims to have two weeks as its very latest point), they will no longer see the company as fit to bear its stamp of approval. Many people couldn’t be happier.
In the first of many emails I received about it the OU’s decision today, the sender framed it as the OU bowing to market pressure. I actually fear that many people will see it as such and applaud their boycotts and outraged blog posts. Now, I have stopped eating Agriprocessors meat for quite a while (ever since the first PETA video, and its subsequent rumblings), and have made my share of outraged statements, several times in very public fora, but I firmly believe that making statements about the OU caving to market pressure is counterproductive and bordering on the offensive.
