Eideard

To the dismay of Israeli ice cream lovers, Haagen-Dazs may soon be disappearing from Israeli supermarket shelves following an announcement from the Chief Rabbinate banning the product.

A notice issued last week by the kashrut, a rabbinical body that sets Jewish dietary law, states that because Haagen-Dazs ice cream is made with real milk it is not suitable for Jewish consumers.

According to Talmudic law, milk produced by non-Jews can only be consumed if it is produced under Jewish supervision to ensure it has not been contaminated with milk from non – kosher animals. There is thought to be less chance of contamination with powdered milk.

As long as Haagen Dazs continues to use real milk, it will be off the menu for Jewish consumers. Selling the ice cream in kosher stores and restaurants also constitutes “a severe infringement of kashrut procedures”…

Israel’s largest supermarket chain Shufersal has already pulled the product off the shelves in all 270 of its stores. On Sunday a Shufersal representative confirmed they would not be selling the ice cream for the foreseeable future.

General Mills, which markets Haagen-Dazs in Israel, has hit back claiming its product has been sold in Israel and enjoyed by Jewish consumers across the world for years bearing kosher certification from the Orthodox Union in the US.

Why the ban has been issued now remains unclear. The rabbinate claim their notice about Haagen Dazs has been issued several times previously but gone unheeded, recommending Israelis turn to home-made kosher ice creams to fill the gap.

The crap regulation of public life by theocrats is as foolish and backwards in Israel as India, America as Afghanistan. Dedicating oversight of food purity to a religious circle-jerk is absurd. Bowing to so-called standards devised centuries ago and reinterpreted to satisfy a religion’s control rather than safety and nutrition based on science and reality – is absurd, inexcusable.

The historic meaning of “fool” is sanctified by a population that lets itself be led around by the nose by such foolishness.

Two Pakistani Muslims in Brooklyn are now running the oldest bialy store in the city, and keeping it kosher.

Zafaryab Ali and his business partner, Peerada Shah, were shocked on hearing through a friend that Coney Island Bialys and Bagels was closing. Ali had worked at the store for 10 years in the 1990s and remembers it always being crowded, with lines out the door and people waiting up to half an hour for fresh bialys. So Ali and Shah bought the store to keep the 91-year business alive.

Bialys are a lighter, softer cousin to the bagel, traditionally made with onion sprinkled on top.

“I know bagels and my partner knows management,” Ali said. “If we work hard and pay attention, we’ll build up and bring more customers in.”

Ali and Shah are keeping everything the same — ingredients, equipment, recipes — all used when it was a kosher store under Jewish management. Ali is now on the hunt for a rabbi to come and give the store an official kosher certification.

They even have some of the same staff, like Ernie Devivo, a semi-retired baker who is still helping out around the shop. “I’m glad we opened up again,” Devivo said. “It’s good for everybody.”

A wonderful tale. RTFA and enjoy ordinary working people who respect other traditions and the sense of community a neighborhood is capable of enjoying.

That the tale is of two Muslims reviving a Jewish tradition is icing on the cake. Or in my case, garlic on a bialy.

Dr. Eli Landau has written “The White Book,” touted as the first Israeli pork cookbook.

With 80 mainly Mediterranean recipes and Eastern European dishes, “The White Book” tries to reveal the secrets of the pig for cooks who have never prepared it nor perhaps even tasted it.

Since the mid-1950s, Israel has had laws restricting the sale of pork and banning its farm production in deference to biblical proscriptions. But because of legal loopholes, it was possible to raise pigs for science or in areas considered Christian. Pork buyers included secular Jews, Christian Arabs and more recently, immigrant workers and the hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who don’t keep kosher.

Now it is up to individual municipalities to determine whether pork can be sold in each neighborhood and whether shops will incur fines for selling it, much as they would for staying open on the Sabbath. Many Jews who ignore other kosher rules will not eat pork for cultural and historical reasons. Observant Muslims also abstain from it.

Even more than other nonkosher foods, pork is seen by many Israelis as an affront to Jewish nationalism. Pork sellers routinely face protesters, and in recent years, arsonists have attacked shops in cities like Netanya and Safed, where Orthodox Jews live near secular immigrant communities.

“People are reluctant to cook pork at home,” said Dr. Landau, who is not an observant Jew. “I want to make it easier for chefs and personal cooks to bring it home and to the menus. If that happens, I’ll be more than happy.”

The book, which Dr. Landau self-published in January, has not caused much of a stir so far.

Dr. Landau said that ultra-Orthodox Jews, who would be most likely to protest, haven’t heard of it because they don’t watch cable news or read the mainstream press.

Pretty interesting tale. Landau reaches out to modern Mediterranean cuisine, shows good sense.

Life in a theocracy has got to be incredibly frustrating to anyone who makes contact on a regular basis with the real world.

He doesn’t need a tie for the new job
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

BALTIMORE — Like any new employee, Jack Abramoff is trying to keep a low profile — or as low a profile as a cause célèbre disgraced lobbyist and convicted felon can keep when news cameramen keep staking out his new workplace.

Mr. Abramoff started his new gig this week at Tov Pizza — “the best kosher pizza in town,” according to a catchy jingle that plays while callers are on hold.

He has so far stayed largely cloistered in a back office. He will work about 40 hours a week, said the owner, Ron Rosenbluth. He comes in around 10:30 a.m., leaves around 5:30 p.m., and wears a yarmulke to work, as many of the male customers and employees here do. He earns between $7.50 and $10 an hour (“or a little less than what he used to make”). He has been responsible, punctual, courteous. “He is not the monster he has been portrayed as,” Mr. Rosenbluth said…

He declined a request for an interview through Mr. Rosenbluth, and departed through a side entrance, skirting photographers waiting for him in a parking lot.

It is too soon to tell if Mr. Abramoff is cut out for a career in the pizza business, Mr. Rosenbluth said Wednesday. “He’s only been here three days,” said Mr. Rosenbluth, who has been here 26 years…

“People ask me, ‘Why would you ever hire Jack Abramoff?’ ” said Mr. Rosenbluth, who said he has not bothered to learn much about Mr. Abramoff’s past. “I say, ‘Why wouldn’t I hire Jack Abramoff?’ He’s paying his debt to society, right?”

As a matter of fact, I agree. I’ve worked with a few ex-cons in my life.

Unlike the unindicted creeps, say, from Lehman Brothers or Countrywide Mortgage, the SEC or Congress who simply move sideways to new job descriptions after they complete a prior round of corruption.

Awaiting sentencing on federal fraud, money-laundering charges

Jury selection has begun in the trial of a former kosher slaughterhouse owner and four workers accused of thousands of child labor violations, such as allowing teenagers to use meat grinders and exposing children to dangerous chemicals.

The trial begins as the former manager of the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, Sholom Rubashkin, awaits sentencing on 86 financial fraud convictions. Prosecutors asked a federal judge at a sentencing hearing last week to give Rubashkin 25 years in prison…

The state filed the charges in September 2008, about four months after an immigration raid at the plant led to the arrest of 389 workers…

“Throughout their employment, these children were exposed to dangerous and/or poisonous chemicals including … dry ice and chlorine solutions,” Assistant Attorneys General Thomas H. Miller and Laura Roan wrote in the original complaint.

That complaint also claimed that children under 16 were allowed to use meat circular saws and power washers…

He also claimed the plant asked for workers’ driver’s licenses and birth certificates, and it wasn’t the company’s fault if people lied.

Roan, the assistant attorney general, wrote in her response that Billmeyer, Althouse and Freund “reasonably knew” that the information provided to them was false. Their guilty pleas to charges related to the hiring of illegal immigrants showed this, prosecutors said.

I’ve posted on the topic before. Meatpackers are the archetypical example of union-busting and sleazy practices – using undocumentados to cut wages and benefits.

RTFA. This is an industry where average wages were better than $18/hour twenty years ago. And, now, underage workers risk life and limb for $7.50/hour – without public complaint.

They don’t go to the carwash either, eh?

Religiously devout Jews barred by rabbis from surfing the Internet may now “Koogle” it on a new “kosher” search engine, the site manager said on Sunday.

Yossi Altman said Koogle, a play on the names of a Jewish noodle pudding and the ubiquitous Google, appears to meet the standards of Orthodox rabbis, who restrict use of the Web to ensure followers avoid viewing sexually explicit material.

The site, at www.koogle.co.il, omits religiously objectionable material, such as most photographs of women which Orthodox rabbis view as immodest, Altman said.

Its links to Israeli news and shopping sites also filter out items most ultra-Orthodox Israelis are forbidden by rabbis to have in their homes, such a television sets.

“This is a kosher alternative for ultra-Orthodox Jews so that they may surf the Internet,” Altman said by telephone.

Silly enough to post on a Sunday afternoon in America. We could have “Boogle” for fundamentalist Baptists or “Popoogle” for charismatic Catholics.

Swine flu? Not in the Jewish state.

“We will call it Mexico flu. We won’t call it swine flu,” Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman, a black-garbed Orthodox Jew, told a news conference Monday, assuring the Israeli public that authorities were prepared to handle any cases.

Under Jewish dietary laws, pigs are considered unclean and pork is forbidden food — although the non-kosher meat is available in some stores in Israel.

One [Bronx] cheer for theocracy!