Opuscula “Glatt” or “Bet Yosef” In Israeli restaurants?

AN ARTICLE IN Israel HaYom for April 28 reported that Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau, in consultation with other Israeli rabbis, has proposed a changes to kashrut supervision in Israel.

The article examines some of the technical changes, but eventually gets to the “bottom line” which is:
The (kashrut) inspectors (משגיחים) no longer will be paid by the food venue owners. Business owners will pay their local rabbinate, which will hire the inspectors as contract service providers rather than as employees of the local council. The reform is expected to eliminate the ties that exist today between business owners and inspectors, as well as the conflict of interest that currently is in place due to the inspectors being paid by the people whose businesses they approve.

This “pay an agency not the mashgiach (kashrut inspector)” is pretty much SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for most establishments operating under an organization’s supervision in the U.S. For example, in Florida’s Broward and Palm Beach counties, inspectors are employed by the Orthodox Rabbinical Board (ORB), the primary kashrut agency in the two-county area.

While it may not seem like a potential problem in Israel, there is the potential for a problem arising between Ashkenazi kashrut and Sefardi/Mizachi kashrut.

Sefardi/Mizrachi kashrut — a/k/a Bet Yosef or halak — demands that a Jew participate in food preparation. It is sufficient for a Jew to light the fire to satisfy Ashkenazi kashrut.

To be fair, since most restaurants in the U.S. — and I suspect Israel, too — are owned and operated by Ashkenazim, Sefardi and Mizrachi Jews “accept” the Ashkenazi kashrut where there is no Bet Yosef/halak option.

A visitor to Israel might mistakenly believe that a. All restaurants in Israel are kosher (they are not) and
b. All Israeli restaurant employees are Jews (they are not).

Where there is a large Sefardi/Mizrachi population, such as in South Florida, some restaurant owners will accommodate requests to have a Jew participate in the food preparation (beyond lighting a fire or turning on the electricity).

The Israel HaYom article did NOT specify if the Mizrachi “Sefardic” Chief Rabbi agrees with Rabbi Lau, nor did the article indicate that a food vendor could request Bet Yosef/halak supervision.

According to the article, Lau's plan will allow tens of thousands of food businesses in Israel -- including restaurants, cafes, pizzerias, falafel stands, and other venues that serve food -- to choose between one of two new models of kashrut supervision: electronic monitoring, which costs less, or the "kashrut trustee" model.

The details are provided in the article.

The impetus for the change likely was a growing movement to offer kashrut supervision not controlled by the Chief Rabbinute.

A personal aside. When I worked in Holon there was a small restaurant near my worksite. I asked the Yemenite owner if he had a kashrut certificate. The man hit the roof and invited me to come into his kitchen and storage areas to see for myself that the operation was strictly kosher. “I’m not going to pay some (expletive deleted) “inspector” to come in and tell me I have a kosher restaurant.”

Caveat: I am not a משגיח and I don’t play one on tv.

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PLAGIARISM is the act of appropriating the literary composition of another, or parts or passages of his writings, or the ideas or language of the same, and passing them off as the product of one’s own mind.

Opuscula Once again Shoah Focuses solely on 6 million victims5 million more killed

It’s Judaism’s mistake and Israel’s mistake to suggest that the only victims of the nazi Holocaust were Jews.

Perhaps 20 years ago, before the Internet had answers to almost everything, that might have been acceptable, albeit not then — and not now — factual.

By making the Holocaust a “Jewish property,” Jews are ignoring history and alienating all the survivors of non-Jews slaughtered by the nazis.

At the same time, these “Holocaust=European Jews” deny the murder of thousands of Jews in Arab countries, notably Iran and Palestine (then under English rule).

No one can, or should, deny that Jews were Hitler’s primary focus. The madman put killing Jews ahead of supplying his troops; he preferred to commandeer cattle cars to haul Jews to their deaths rather than to carry supplies to the German soldiers.

At the same time, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who American Jews unwittingly held as a minor deity, refused to bomb the rail lines that carried thousands of Jews to their deaths, even though the tracks were on the routes American bombers were flying to reach FDR-approved targets. This should not have come a surprise; FDR denied entry to Jews on board the St. Louis, sending them back to Germany and their deaths.

From the Jewish Virtual Library

• “All Poles will disappear from the world.... It is essential that the great German people should consider it as its major task to destroy all Poles.” Heinrich Himmler
  The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) has an online document discussing the plight of Poles -- all Poles, not just Jews -- during the nazi occupation.
• Hitler felt particularly threatened by Jehovah's Witnesses because they, from the very beginning, refused to recognize any God other than Jehovah.
• Roma Gypsies were a nomadic people that were persecuted throughout history. Both Jews and Roma were denied certain privileges in many European countries. The Germans believed both the Jews and the Gypsies were racially inferior and degenerate and therefore worthless.
  The Gypsies were also moved into special areas set up by the Nazis and half a million of them - representing almost the entire Eastern European Gypsy population - was wiped out during the Holocaust.
• Thousands of Catholic priests and Christian pastors were forced into concentration camps. A special barracks was set up at Dachau, the camp near Munich, Germany, for clergymen. A few survived; some were executed, but most were allowed to die slowly of starvation or disease.
• Between 5,000 to 15,000 homosexuals died in concentration camps during the Holocaust.
• During Hitler’s “cleansing program”, thousands of people with various handicaps were deemed useless and simply put to death like dogs and cats.

The above, and more, from a Jewish source proves that we — Jews — know that while Jews were the nazi’s primary target, we hardly were the nazi’s only “chosen people.”

Image source: https://longreads.com/2015/07/14/the-missing-history-of-ravensbruck-the-nazi-concentration-camp-for-women/

As an aside, the Warsaw ghetto was not the only time Jews fought back. The Holocaust Resistance includes a lengthy list of Jewish & Partisan Resistance groups and a nearly 30-name list of Jewish fighters that certainly is not "all inclusive."

USHMM's Documenting Numbers Of Victims Of The Holocaust And Nazi Persecution "guesstimates" the number of victims of nazi theology by category; e.g., Jews: up to 6 million; Soviet civilians: 5.7 million (excluding Jewish victims counted in the 6 million above); People with disabilities living in institutions: up to 250,000; Roma (Gypsies): 196,000–220,000.

The Holocaust went beyond Europe, although many Jews fail to recognize this.

Arab countries where the nazis had influence also slaughtered Jews simply because they were Jews. The most (in)famous pogrom was Iraq’s Farhud, but Iraq was not the only place Jews were attacked and murdered. Even in (British) Mandatory Palestine, Arabs managed to attack and kill Jews following Mufti Mohammed Amin Al-Husseini, who promoted Hitler to the Arabs of the Middle East.

Wikipedia reports that "There were pogroms against Jews prior to the foundation of Israel, including Nazi-inspired pogroms in Algeria in the 1930s, and attacks on the Jews of Iraq and Libya in the 1940s. In 1941, 180 Jews were murdered and 700 were injured in the anti-Jewish riots known as the Farhud."

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A few Internet sites that include non-Jews in the total nazi slaughter include;

The Holocaust: Non-Jewish Victims

The Holocaust’s Forgotten Victims: The 5 Million Non-Jewish People Killed By The Nazis

Poles: Victims of the Nazis

World War II casualties

Documenting Numbers Of Victims Of The Holocaust And Nazi Persecution

Overlooked Millions: Non-Jewish Victims of the Holocaust

Nazi Body Count 20,946,000 "non-battle" deaths

Soviet Prisoners of War: Forgotten Nazi Victims of World War II

Holocaust: The Ignored Reality

Arab states and the Holocaust – a sampling

The Extent of Nazism in the Middle-East: the Farhud

Farhud memories: Baghdad's 1941 slaughter of the Jews

Antisemitism in the Arab world

Jewish Population Of French North Africa

Relations between Nazi Germany and the Arab world

As with most things connected to the Internet, the previous URLs are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

PLAGIARISM is the act of appropriating the literary composition of another, or parts or passages of his writings, or the ideas or language of the same, and passing them off as the product of one’s own mind.

Opuscula Terrorists in Israel Denied human rights

Terrorists in Israeli prisons have no human rights.

True, they can watch tv.

True they receive paychecks from liberals worldwide, with only a “small” handling fee deducted by the terrorists’ masters.

True, no one makes them work – no chain gangs for terrorists.

They used to get free college-level education, but no more.

So what don’t they have any human rights?

Because Israel insists on force feeding hunger strikers.

ON THE ONE HAND, the World condemns Israel — and to a lesser extent other nations where hunger strikes occur — for allowing a hunger strike in the first place,

Then the World criticizes Israel — and to a lesser extent other nations where hunger strikes occur — for force feeding the strikers.

As far as this scrivener is concerned, if a terrorist wants to starve, LET HIM (or her) starve It is their human right to commit suicide by starvation — or for that matter, any other way they elect to take their own lives (rather than innocents’ lives).

The hunger strikers have almost all been tried in open court, convicted of their crimes, and sentenced to “n” years in gaol — assuming hundreds aren’t released in exchange for one Israeli captive as has happened too often in the past.

As far the PA providing “salaries” for jailed terrorists, Israel should BILL THE TERRORISTS for the prisoner’s room and board. Want to use the gym? Pay for the privilege. Take the funds from the terrorist’s salary. Families want to come for a visit: charge an entry fee; the PA’s despots can afford to give each visitor a coin or two for their hoard.

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PLAGIARISM is the act of appropriating the literary composition of another, or parts or passages of his writings, or the ideas or language of the same, and passing them off as the product of one’s own mind.