Responding to accusations that AgriProcessors, the nation’s largest kosher meat processing plant and manufacturer of the Aaron’s Best brand, routinely violates worker’s rights, Conservative rabbis are stepping into the fray.

Conservative movement leaders said that they plan to establish a “tsedek hekhsher,” or a justice certification, that would ensure kosher food producers “have met a set of standards that determine the social responsibility of kosher food producers, particularly in the area of workers rights.”

Surprisingly, the OU did some tap-dancing on this one.

Reached this week, the head of the Orthodox Union’s kosher division, Rabbi Menachem Genack, applauded the Conservative movement for looking at labor issues, given the weight of Jewish law dedicated to the topic. Genack also said he had spoken with AgriProcessors and the United States Department of Agriculture about the working conditions at the plant. But Genack said that the Conservative movement should be careful not to blur the line between Jewish law regarding worker rights and Jewish law regarding the kosher standard of food.

“There are lots of social issues that are really important that could be subsumed under some sort of super certification,” Genack said. “But if we just move away from strict concerns about kashruth — if we talk about what they pay workers — these kinds of standards can be less than 100% clear.”

Genack also said that a major priority for the Orthodox Union was to make kosher food more widely available. “For us to set up a new amorphous standard in certain plants,” Genack said, “parts of the kosher industry are very fragile and could be adversely affected by this.” [emphasis added]

I get that kashrut is kashrut, and social justice is something else. But does R. Genack really want to be saying he’s too afraid of upsetting profits in the kosher market to make a stand for social justice?

Because that’s what he’s saying.

Workers in the AgriProcessors plant are, by and large, Mexican and Latin American immigrants, many undocumented. The recent heartbreaking news coming out of the Swift processing plant immigration raids should have our outrage pretty close to the surface on this one. It’s been shown that AgriProcessors is no different: Immigrants. Frightening working conditions. Abysmal pay.

Have you ever heard this story before? Maybe from your Zayde?

Without getting too much higher on the soap box - let us applaud the Conservative rabbis. Let us remember that our food is not an isolated item on the plate but part of a chain of events, and that it would make us a very cold people indeed if we were more concerned for the way an animal died than for the way a human lived.