The Kosher Crisis: American Jews Take a Stand

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Take 389 illegal immigrants and stick them in a meat processing plant. Add 57 workers under the age of 16. Stir in the fact that the company, Agriprocessors Inc., is the nation’s leading source of kosher meat, and not only do you get the biggest federal immigration raid in history, but thousands of pissed off American Jews.

A new debate was sparked this summer when feds raided Agriprocessors’ Postville, Iowa plant in May. They uncovered worker complaints of forced unpaid overtime, frequent accidents and abuse and extortion by floor supervisors, according to an article in The Forward printed in August. These reports became a source of embarrassment and outrage for Jews across denominations. Agriprocessors isn’t KFC or a third-world sweatshop; The company produces meat that is certified kosher, meaning clean — meat that is ritually slaughtered in accordance with God’s laws as specified in the Torah. Jews have been eating kosher for thousands of years, but in a country where the line between church and state gets fuzzy, so too has the jurisdiction on who should be looking out for worker safety. Now Jews from all over the country, including those who don’t keep kosher, are speaking out for change, not just at Agriprocessors, but across the industry.

One group trying to clear a path through this nebulous area is a grassroots campaign called Hekhsher Tzedek. The group seeks to add a second, voluntary seal next to the kosher hekhsher on meat specifying that the company meets standards for ethical treatment in five categories: Health, safety and training for employees; fair wages and benefits for employees; an environmentally-friendly business model; corporate transparency (no whispering behind closed doors), and product development. Only companies that have already been certified kosher will be eligible for this ethical seal.

“Ethics are woven into the fabric of Torah,” said Rabbi Morris Allen in a November 2007 interview with Zeek magazine . Allen, a congregational rabbi at Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights, Minn., is the main proponent of Hekhsher Tzedek, which is literally a “justice seal” in Hebrew. On certified kosher food around the nation, consumers can find labels on the packaging called hekhshers; One of the most trusted is an O with a U inside it for the Orthodox Union. These marks let shoppers know that a rabbi has overseen the production of the food, whether it be processed meat, a cup of yogurt or a package of Oreos. For meat, a rabbi will check to make sure that a kosher butcher has killed the animal in the correct place to ensure as quick and painless a death as possible; that all the blood has been completely drained; and that the meat has not come in contact with dairy products, among other specifications.
Hekhsher Tzedek took root 2 years ago when Allen first heard reports of worker abuse at Agriprocessors.

“I’ve been promoting the observance of kashrut ever since I became a pulpit rabbi,” Allen said. When The Forward printed the exposé that May, Allen felt guilty for promoting this ethically questionable processor. “I felt personally blindsided,” he recalled.

After visiting the plant with a group of other rabbis from the Synagogue of Conservative Judaism and The Rabbinic Assembly, Allen said they approached the Rubashkin family, the Lubavitch owners of Agriprocessors, directly. Allen said they asked the Rubashkins to take three “confidence-building steps” that would satisfy Jewish law, the United States government and take the heat off of Agriprocessors. Those steps were: 1) Invite the Iowa Department of Labor’s Consultation and Education division to do a health safety training scan of the plant; 2) Conduct all training sessions in the workers’ vernacular, Spanish, and provide Spanish-language training materials; 3) Have upper-level managers sign an agreement against intimidation so workers may feel free to “talk in an organized fashion” about their experiences at work.

The Rubashkin family chose to ignore the advice of Allen and the other participating rabbis and Jewish leaders in 2006, and this past May’s raid proved the consequences.

Worker mistreatment didn’t end with the raid, however. Immigrant workers were jailed, then deported, leaving their children and wives in Postville sporting chunky black ankle bracelets that monitor their every move. The federal government tore these families apart, in most cases leaving those who remain with little or no means of supporting themselves.

Jewish Community Action, a group fighting for economic and social justice in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul region of Minnesota has done more than a decade of immigrant rights work. When more than a thousand people gathered in Postville for a march on immigrant rights, Jewish Community Action sent three busloads with 200 people bearing signs that said things like, “Jewish Values, Jewish Equality” and “We Want Justice!” The JCA has raised more than $20,000 for immigrant families affected by the raids and has taken the lead on Hekhsher Tzedek initiatives in the Twin Cities.

Although Hekhsher Tzedek is a national campaign, JCA has become the guinea pig by piloting community organizing efforts in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. According to community organizer Melissa Rudnik, JCA is taking a four-pronged approach to tackling kosher activism.

“What we’re doing with each constituency group is that there’s four areas that we’re asking teams to focus on. One is programming and education and that can look a million different ways in different communities, whether they want to do Shabbat evenings, house parties or kosher wine tastings for those of age,” Rudnik said, extolling the virtues of creative organizing. The second area of their campaign is maintaining ongoing buzz and visibility, whether plastering a college campus with thought-provoking posters or posting prolifically on the Hekhsher Tzedek blog . The third step is ongoing one-to-one recruitment.

“That is one of the challenges of organizing that I personally love. Say you’re at a Shabbat dinner at Hillel and you meet someone and you chat with them. Set up a time to meet with them over coffee and chat in depth about the project and how they might want to get involved.” She explained that finding out a volunteer’s interests and what motivates them is the best way to plug them into the efforts. The fourth avenue is a little more concrete: developing steps toward implementation means creating a list of tasks, like approaching kosher food businesses.

“There’s also the work of building relationships with people directly affected by the issues,” Rudnik added, citing worker organizations and immigrant rights groups.

“The depth of Hekhsher Tzedek really gets into the worker treatment. It’s subjective and verifiable. Someone can tell you it’s organic, but you still want to see the label. It’s a way to put a national standard on it.”

“I would love to get a hekhsher from them,” said Devora Kimelman-Block, the mastermind behind Kosher Organic-raised Local Foods, an independent kosher beef and lamb provider that prides itself in its commitment to sustainable kosher meat production that treats its animals and its workers humanely while stabilizing rural economies and doing less harm to the environment.

“An industrial system is not sustainable. I’m working outside the industrial system because I believe that. However, we [in this nation] are using the industrial system and that should be as ethical as possible,” said Kimelman-Block, whose enterprise began with a budding relationship between her family and the local farmer near her home in Maryland.

“I had a vegetarian kosher kitchen for years because I didn’t want to support the industrial meat farming and production system,” she said. “Then I started up an organic vegetable CSA and a couple of years after that I thought, ‘Hey why don’t I try this with meat?’”

In a CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture, people buy a share of their local farmer’s produce for the season. Over time, Kimmel-Block developed a relationship with her farmer and she sometimes brings her kids out to visit the farm. “I think it’s important to know where your food comes from,” she said.

One day the farmer approached her about arranging kosher slaughter for his animals. He had become friendly with the congregants at the synagogue where he delivered vegetables and was aware that they couldn’t partake of his beef and poultry. Kimelman-Block looked into what it would take to get the farm kosher certified, but plenty of roadblocks stood in their path.

“It was way, way more complicated than either of us had thought it would be,” she said. “In my head, I thought maybe my farmer could get kosher certified and he thought so too. But as it turns out, you need to study for a year, you need to be Orthodox, you need to be a man — there’s all these qualifications.” So they hired a freelance shochet , or kosher butcher, who they pay to come in and slaughter according to the laws in the Torah. Although the situation is not ideal because of its expense, Kimelman-Block has found a business model that works, and her kitchen is no longer vegetarian.

“I know the farms, I know the farmers and I’ve looked these animals in the eye. It definitely grows your relationship to look at them in that way — like what this animal is going to be giving up to become food for me. I want to treat that animal well and I want it to be special. I don’t want it to be just a McDonald’s hamburger, you know?”

Although KOL Foods is thriving within its limited distribution to synagogues and university Hillels from New Jersey to North Carolina, Jews outside those regions still must rely on the shrink-wrapped Empire chickens and Hebrew National hotdogs at their supermarkets. Jewish consumers know the animals were killed humanely because of the kosher seal on the label, but the scandal at Agriprocessors proves that a seal doesn’t tell us about how the animals lived, or about how the people packaging their koshered carcasses are treated.

That’s where Hekhsher Tzedek comes in. “We need Hekhsher Tzedek because we don’t know what companies we can point to,” Rudnik explained. “We can’t tell you where you can buy ethical kosher meat now because we don’t know.” She explained that the evaluation process behind Hekhsher Tzedek will help consumers make ethical decisions about the kosher meat they buy. Until then, Rudnik suggests that people start educating themselves and their communities about where their food comes from. “Is it local? Is it being brought in? Start investigating that. What do you mean when you say you are looking for ethical food? Start chewing on those issues together. Learning more about your local market and your local industry is an important step.”

“I’m just very glad they are doing it. It’s nice to have a strong voice, a rabbinic voice, coming out of the Jewish community, saying this is wrong,” Kimelman-Block said. “There are a lot of rabbinic voices that aren’t saying that. The OU’s line has been that the ethical concerns are concerns of the national government and that they don’t regulate that. For most of the Jewish community, that really isn’t good enough.”