Shmuly Yanklowitz at Cafe Nana, the first restaurant to receive the Tav HaYosher

One year after the federal raid of the Agriprocessors plant in Postville, Iowa, Uri L’tzedek (Awaken to Justice), an orthodox social action group,  has responded by establishing an ethical seal, Tav HaYosher, for all kosher eating establishments. “After seeing the pain and suffering inflicted by our own kosher industry on the stranger and the poor, the very people the Torah demands we protect, we realized we needed to be proactive and make a change,” said Shmuly Yanklowitz, founder and co-director of Uri L’Tzedek.

I  had the opportunity to speak with Rachel Rosenthal, an active member of Uri L’Tzedek and the Tav HaYosher campaign, and has taught about ethical kashrut in communities across the Upper West Side.

The Tav YaHosher campaign launches today with a public event 6:30 -8:30 pm at Cafe Nina, 505 W.115th St., 2nd floor, in New York City.  My interview with Rachel is after the jump.

Cross-posted from Heeb’n'Vegan.  With the one year anniversary of the May 12, 2008 raid on the AgriProcessor’s plant in Postville Iowa at hand Michael’s interview of Shmarya Rosenberg is very timely.  To see the Jew and the Carrot’s coverage of Agriprocessors click here.

Shmarya Rosenberg’s blog Failed Messiah has become a one-stop hub for news and commentary about scandals and all-around unpleasantness in the kosher meat industry, among other foibles in the Orthodox community. With muckraking reporting and critical commentary, Rosenberg has held the feet of many in the Jewish community to the fire while providing readers with invaluable information.

Failed Messiah has been a leading force in the Jewish blogosphere since 2004, but the May 12, 2008, raid at AgriProcessors in Postville, Iowa, was the beginning of a new era. One year ago, government agencies staged the largest single-site immigration raid in U.S. history, arresting hundreds of illegal immigrant workers and uncovering such diverse problems as child labor and a “meth lab.” Rosenberg claims that Failed Messiah broke the story (although technical difficulties meant that The Des Moines Register posted it online more or less simultaneously). He has stayed in touch with people on the ground in Postville to report about what’s going on from many perspectives, Failed Messiah’s readership jumped to about 15,000 page views on some days, and he became somewhat of a hero when he unveiled the questionable practices of AgriProcessors’ PR company, 5WPR.

Below are excerpts of an interview I conducted with Rosenberg on Friday.

Photo by Julian Darwall. Illustration by Nick Shepard.

Attention Jewish Foodies! Check out this article, “Culture Clash in the New Jewish Food Movement”, published recently in New Voices, describing the question of elitism in the New Jewish Food Movement.  The piece is meant to start a conversation about the multiplicity of entry points and priorities in the Movement, and I hope you find it interesting. As an active member in the New Jewish Food Movement and a reporter on this piece, I found myself in some fascinating conversations that I hope will continue with all of you.

Thanks so much to Jonathan Henkin for this great May Day guest post.  Jonathan is a senior undergraduate in the Joint Program between Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, an Uri L’Tzedek Intern and a future Tav HaYosher volunteer compliance coordinator.

Although social justice has been a subject of importance to many Jews throughout the generations, Orthodox communities have often lagged behind other segments of Jews in supporting such efforts, failing especially in supporting social justice initiatives that extend beyond their own immediate communities. The organization Uri L’tzedek (Hebrew for “Awaken to Justice”) is rapidly growing into an alternative to Orthodox social justice apathy. Uri L’tzedek is a grassroots organization founded nearly two years ago by students of the Manhattan-based rabbinical school Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, as well as others interested in spreading ideals of social justice throughout Orthodoxy, especially Modern Orthodoxy. Uri L’tzedek disseminates this message through a combination of educational programs, training leaders in social justice activism, and actively pursuing progressive change through lobbying, community organizing, and other endeavors. Uri L’tzedek has been heavily involved with the situation at Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa. The organization’s latest exciting project is the imminent launching of the Tav HaYosher (Ethical Seal), a program to denote which New York kosher restaurants treat their workers with the minimum workplace conditions accorded them by law.

Sometime during all of the Agriprocessors brouhaha I heard that there had been a kosher meat boycott in 1902. I didn’t know anything about it until I just stumbled upon this article from the Jewish Historical Society: Bravo, Bravo, Bravo, Jewish Women! The Kosher Meat Boycott Of 1902.

The boycott was because the price of kosher meat had gotten too high, so Jewish women banded together, influenced by the labor and union strikes of their time, and organized to boycott kosher meat. Here’s how it went down:

�

When it comes to food, I’ve acted the part of intercessor more than once in my life. I’ve given propagandistic explanations of what CAFO’s are. I’ve pressured room mates and lovers, gently but manipulatively, to give up corn syrup and non-organic produce. I’ve been even more sneaky and covert. When my little sister, who will eat only four things, revealed that she was under the misapprehension that kosher meat was ethically raised, I didn’t disabuse her.

The kosher food industry has been playing its undeserved part as moral intercessor for a while now. An article like this one in Food Quality, shows that non-Jews invest our religious standards for food as a moral litmus that corresponds to their ethics. This revelation makes me feel proud, but also somewhat angry. The world thinks so highly of us that they’re willing to trust our standards, but Agriprocessors showed that the laws of kashrut have nothing to do with the laws of the rest of the world.

While there is certainly a kosher meat crisis on our hands and many families are struggling to feed their families meat, it was still disconcerting to read the January 20th KosherToday report, especially the section titled “Agriprocessors Limps Back to Life.”   

According to the weekly kosher news report written and distributed by Menachem Lubinsky of Lubicom Industries, there are rumors that “the bankrupt Agriprocessors will soon begin the kosher slaughter of turkeys and that it is only a matter of time that the plant will also resume the shechita (kosher slaughter) of calves.” 

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.