Wow! This has been some week! Scandal galore.Food for thought. There is at least one magazine devoted to matters of kashrus that must be rolling in joy, screaming with delight and already writing scores of scandal alerts!
This story comes from the electronic version of the Forward. The article deals with two scandals: one the trefe chicken horror in Monsey and the other dealing with a kosher slaughter house where the workers were shipping marijuana! (Gives new meaning to the question: Hey, man, is this pot kosher?
Please note, we have edited out much of the material in the article dealing with the Monsey chicken scandal as we have already run that story.
First, a group of rabbis in New York discovered boxes upon boxes of nonkosher meat in the warehouse of a major kosher meat distributor. At roughly the same time, in Pennsylvania, federal agents seized 726 pounds of marijuana at a kosher slaughterhouse.
The drug bust occurred in Birdsboro at the G & G Poultry facility, which produces kosher chicken under the strictest rabbinic supervision. According to an affidavit from a federal customs agent, the authorities tracked the movement of marijuana in and out of the factory’s parking lot for more than a week before moving in. Of the four people who were arrested during the raid, three appeared to be G & G employees; however, none of them was Jewish. Two of the men arrested in the bust, which was first reported by the Reading Eagle, were undocumented Mexican immigrants, authorities said in a statement. ……………..
In both of the current cases, the transgressions appear to have slipped by the rabbis who are supposed to keep careful watch over the kosher production process, which demands strict quality control. Some kosher authorities said that this week’s incidents point to the difficulties faced by the rabbinical community as it copes with the increasing industrialization of the kosher meat business.
“Kosher meat was done in a little store — or by a slaughterer — 50 years ago,” said Rabbi Yaakov Spivak, rabbinic administrator of Monsey-based United Kosher Supervision. Spivak’s agency had no supervisory authority over the tainted meat.
“When you have mass-produced meat products, there are more links in the chain — and the chain is as strong as its weakest link,” Spivak added.
In the case of the G & G Poultry plant, where the drug bust took place, the problems seem to have been restricted to a few of the plant’s 120 some employees. In the affidavit, federal agent Rebecca Lafferty said that her agency began tracking the shipment of marijuana when it arrived in Baltimore in a cargo container from Mexico. Customs officials opened the container and found blocks of marijuana inside “handy crafts [sic] made of pottery, wood and plaster.”
The authorities allowed the container to pass through so that they could track its movement, and in mid-August it was shipped to the G & G facilities, which are near Reading, Pa. The affidavit describes Hispanic men driving in and out of the factory parking lot with rental trucks after a Saturday delivery date, when the kosher factory would have been closed.
Federal agents finally raided the plant after seeing three men unloading the cargo container during business hours and placing the pottery-encased marijuana outside the fence surrounding G & G. The owner of G & G, Meir Grunbaum, said that he knew nothing of the problems until the raid.
“The truck came in the middle of the night, with nobody knowing about it,” Grunbaum said. He added that the two men who actually had been responsible for bringing the container onto the property had fled the country and were never arrested. According to Grunbaum, the two employees who were taken in were wrongly arrested, having done nothing more than obey orders to remove the contents of the cargo container from the G & G property.
“The federal agents were embarrassed to go away from here with no arrest, so they just made a false arrest, and that’s not right,” Grunbaum said.
Grunbaum said that one of the men, who is still being held in Philadelphia, had been on his first day of work at G & G when the raid occurred. Grunbaum’s explanation is not contradicted by the affidavit, which makes no mention of any role played by the four arrested men in the pot plot before the morning of the raid. Moreover, the person who was listed as the recipient of the cargo container was not among those arrested.
This is not the first time that attention is being drawn to the employment of Hispanic immigrants at America’s kosher slaughterhouses. The Conservative synagogue movement is currently investigating the working conditions of Hispanic immigrants in Postville, Iowa, at the nation’s largest kosher slaughterhouse, AgriProcessors, where some 800 people are employed.
The G & G plant receives its kosher supervision from both the Orthodox Union and the Central Rabbinical Congress, a Brooklyn-based agency affiliated with the ultra-Orthodox Satmar sect. Neither supervisory agency had any comment on the busts. ………………..
(Speaking in Monsey, Rabbi) Spivak, another local kosher authority, said that the larger issue the community needed to deal with was the “spiritual damage” to local Orthodox residents who believe that eating nonkosher meat is “mantanan salay — that it contaminates the heart.”
The incident in Monsey also has brought to light the fact that for all the careful kosher supervision in the meat industry, many distributors — the middlemen in the food chain — are not required to secure the kosher supervision that must be maintained by stores and slaughterhouses. Rabbi Moshe Elefant, a kosher administrator at the Orthodox Union, said that while his organization had nothing to do with the situation in Monsey, the current incident could provoke all supervising agencies to begin requiring supervision of distributors.
(Again, speaking of Monsey) Shain, the veteran kosher administrator, said that he had pointed out problems with Shevach meats a number of years ago but no steps had been taken to rectify the situation. Shain said he is certain that Monsey is not the only place with such problems.
“If you think that I have a doubt that this kind of game is going on in other places — I’m telling you that it is,” Shain said.
Fri. Sep 08, 2006
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