Kosher Gets Ethical

A new standard is about to remake American Jews’ dietary code.

By LOUIS NAYMAN

Kosher is about to get an American makeover. Sometime between Passover and Chanukah 2011, a new social responsibility certification—the Magen Tzedek (Star of Justice)—is expected to begin appearing on the labels of selected kosher food products throughout the United States.

Kosher products are those that meet the standards of kashrus, Jewish dietary law prescribing what foods or combination of foods are permissible or prohibited to eat. Pork and shellfish are forbidden. Meat and dairy products cannot be mixed. Ingredients and processes must be inspected to make certain that nothing prohibited is introduced. Even otherwise permissible meat is kosher only if slaughtered, processed and inspected according to specific procedures under the supervision of a specially trained rabbi. Some orthodox Jews insist on an additional set of inspections involving examination of the lungs and internal organs to make certain that they are smooth—glatt—and free of punctures or disease.

Kosher food is a $250 billion business, accounting for approximately 40 percent of all packaged foods sold in the United States. That makes kosher certification—by agencies specializing in rabbinic supervision of kashrus compliance—a big enterprise as well. By far the largest certifier of domestic kosher products is the nonprofit Orthodox Union, whose U inside an O symbol appears on more than 400,000 products, including Land O’ Lakes butter, Golden West beef, Jolt energy drinks, Oreo cookies, Glenmorangie Single Malt Scotch and Blue Bunny ice cream.

Those who remember the 1970s television ad for Hebrew National hot dogs (“We answer to a higher authority!”) can be forgiven for assuming that current kosher certification explicitly mandates labor standards, hygienic conditions and environmental ethics surpassing federal or state requirements. It does not.

Magen Tzedek certification, say its developers, is intended to assure purchasers that a kashrus-compliant product also conforms to Biblical and Talmudic ethical values and standards regarding the treatment of workers, animal welfare, environmental impact and fair business dealings. Criteria for product certification include: living-wage compensation and decent benefits, neutrality in labor organizing drives, documented compliance with EPA and OSHA regulations, adherence to humane animal treatment and farm standards, responsible energy and water consumption, use of sustainable materials and alternative fuels, and fair treatment of immigrant workers.

The new certification is now in beta testing, with an expected market rollout sometime during the coming year, says Rabbi Morris Allen, who is working with Cornell University meat science professor Joe Regenstein and Social Accountability International to ready the standard for market. The spiritual leader of the Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights, Minn., Allen has a history of involvement as a pulpit rabbi in issues such as prison reform and immigrants rights, and has been leading the push for Magen Tzedek during the last five years.

It has been a polarizing effort. Some Jewish leaders believe the new standard is redundant and unnecessary. Rabbi Avi Shafran, spokesperson for Agudath Israel of America—a leading fundamentalist Orthodox religious, educational and advocacy organization—isn’t convinced that kashrus needs yet another certification. “I think that many consumers have no reason to distrust the government agencies and law enforcement agencies as adequate safeguards for all those areas,” he says. “I know of no halachic [pertaining to Jewish law] opinion requiring a kosher consumer to try to ensure that companies go beyond what governmental rules require of them.”

Rabbi Menachem Genack, one of the foremost experts of kashrus certification in the world and the Rabbinic Administrator and CEO of the Orthodox Union’s kashrus program, is “keeping an open mind.” Under his leadership, the Orthodox Union will allow the Magen Tzedek to be placed on labels next to the familiar OU logo.

Allen is determined to bring the new kosher standard to grocery store shelves around the country. “We have one chance to do this right,” he insists. “We as a people should not be more concerned about the smoothness of a cow’s lung than the safety of a worker’s hand.”

Louis Nayman is a longtime union organizer. The views expressed are his own.

Jews Ready To Roll Out New 'Ethical Kosher' Seals

By Nicole Neroulias
Religion News Service

NEW YORK (RNS) What does it really mean for your Hebrew National hot dog to "answer to a higher authority?"

For years, it's meant a kosher certification that ensured Jewish (and non-Jewish) consumers were buying a product that met strict religious standards for slaughter and preparation that went beyond government requirements.

Now a controversial Jewish movement believes kosher food must meet an even higher ethical ideal -- and they're rolling out a stamp of approval to make it official.

The new Magen Tzedek "seal of justice," developed by Conservative Judaism's Hekhsher Tzedek Commission will be tested on at least two kosher food companies in early 2011.

Standards and fees will be adjusted after 10 weeks of reviewing a host of conditions -- including labor, animal welfare, consumer rights, corporate integrity and environmental impact -- and analyzed by a New York-based auditing firm, said Rabbi Morris Allen, the project's
director.

The new seal is a response to poor labor and animal welfare practices at the now-defunct Agriprocessors meat plant in Postville, Iowa, which had earned a kosher stamp of approval from Orthodox rabbis.

The dueling kosher certifications have opened a rift between Hekhsher Tzedek's Conservative backers and Orthodox Jews, who control most existing kosher standards and are the largest consumers of kosher products.

Kosher certification, now available from hundreds of agencies and stamped on more than one-third of American food products, costs anywhere from a few hundred to tens of thousands of dollars, depending on a company's size.

The new, supplemental Magen Tzedek approval will probably cost in the "low-to-mid-four figures," Allen estimates, which shouldn't result in higher prices for kosher foods.

What may raise the price, however, is if a company needs to improve conditions to meet ethical standards.

"If the company wants our seal and they're paying (workers) poorly, they may have to raise their compensation to their employees, and those sort of things," Allen said. "But most companies that are already being good food production companies, it will be a negligible cost."

Critics say the new ethical kosher movement is an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy in an industry that's already under government regulation. The (Orthodox) Rabbinical Council of America released its own kosher ethical guidelines last January, but emphasized that food
supervisors don't have the expertise to recognize or handle illegal or unethical business practices.

Kosher certifications usually pay for themselves through increased market share, and skeptics are doubtful the industry will see the same benefits in a second ethical seal, on top of meeting federal USDA and work-safety requirements.

"Companies already have enough on their hands," said Rabbi Menachem Genack, the rabbinic administrator of the Orthodox Union's kosher division, which had certified Agriprocessors. "We think that the government agencies have the experience and resources to do that better than us."

Menachem Lubinsky, editor of Kosher Today and president of LUBICOM Marketing Consulting, which specializes in the kosher food industry, said most companies don't want yet another symbol on their packaging, and that the Magen Tzedek stamp may even prompt a backlash from Orthodox consumers.

"There's a perspective that those companies will be seen as having caved in to Conservative demands and being more left-leaning," he said, adding that smaller kosher producers won't be able to afford or compete with Magen Tzedek's requirements.

"(Consumers) see this as being superfluous and they have full faith in the government to protect them," he added. "There are always problems slipping through the cracks ... but (ethical kosher) would unfairly burden the small producers."

Allen maintains that it's not enough to merely expect kosher food companies to meet or exceed government workplace standards, just as Jews don't leave it to state laws to ensure that food advertised as kosher is actually kosher.

"The government is oftentimes stretched, and is not able to do the kinds of inspections that should take place," Allen said. "For us, these are religious issues, no less than certifying the ritual nature of the product. It's our responsibility to see that in the production of kosher
food, the ethical demands of the Jewish people are also being met."

Allen also dismisses critics who say Conservative Jews are trying to compete with, or supplant, the Orthodox in policing the kosher food industry.

"As far as I know," he said, "there's no unique responsibility for only the Orthodox to be involved in determining standards."

The movement does have some support among the Orthodox, including Uri L'Tzedek, an Orthodox initiative that aims to ensure that kosher restaurants pay minimum wage and overtime.

Since its debut in May 2009, about 60 kosher eateries in America have earned the group's Tav HaYosher seal. Director Rabbi Ari Weiss said several restaurant owners have told him that the ethical seal has improved business among customers who care about fair workplace standards.

The same may hold true for ethical kosher food products, he said.

"We see it as bringing ethics and ethical consumption into the Jewish marketplace," Weiss said. "In any community, there are bad actors and good actors ... We're asking them to abide by the law. Nothing more, nothing less."

Despite resistance from the Orthodox, ethical-kosher supporter say their efforts will appeal to the wider spectrum of Jewish and even non-Jewish consumers who care that their food comes from a place that paid, not just prayed, properly.

"At the end of the day, it's a win-win for the kosher food industry," Allen said, "because for some people, our symbol will be the only symbol that they will care about.

The Rise of Ethical Kashrut

Baltimore Jewish Times
December 20, 2010

I like my meat – even though I don’t eat it often due to kosher meat’s insanely high prices in this country. But when I do buy it, I’d like to know that child labor laws, environmental standards, communal responsibility and general decent human behavior has not been violated in its preparation. (Knowing of such things does govern where I shop, which is why I don’t care to step in a Walmart or a certain kosher market in Baltimore, which are stories I’d be happy to share…).

Now, thanks to the Conservative movement – in which I was raised and remain – I and so many others are poised to actually feel good about the kosher meat available.

Many remember how scandal rocked the kashrut industry three years ago. That’s when the behemoth (pun intended) Agriprocessors was cited for hundreds of labor violations, some involving children, and so much more. No longer could one believe the label “kosher” automatically denoted “better”. Rather, at best it meant that the food preparation hit a baseline standard of Jewish law.

Now, in good news for all kosher consumers and certainly the Jewish people’s image, what for some is an unlikely player is about to bring an ethical seal of approval into the marketplace.

The Conservative movement’s Hekhsher Tzedek Commission will in early January 2011 begin testing select companies’ domestic food production standards on five levels –labor practices, animal welfare practices, consumer protection, corporate integrity and environmental impact. After a three-month trial, the Commission will decide if the company deserves the designation of a “Magen Tzedek,” or “seal of justice,” reports “The Forward.” (See: http://forward.com/articles/133979/) Even better, the results will be made public in March.

Rabbi Morris Allen, director of the project, would not identify the companies, but called them “significant players in the food industry — and in the kosher food industry.”

How big could this get? Approximately 40 percent of food manufactured in the country carrying a kashrut certification, according to “The Forward.” Thus, the potential for ethical stewardship of so much more than ingredients is massive.

We may not quite be what we eat, but how that food arrives on our plate matters to many of us. And as discerning consumers, shouldn’t we care about what Judaism instructs, our role in our planet’s health and how those two efforts intersect?

Posted by Neil Rubin on 12/20/10 at 03:56 PM

Tough New Ethics Seal Set To Be Tested in Kosher Marketplace

The Jewish Daily Forward
December 15, 2010

After more than a year of fine-tuning, the criteria for earning a Magen Tzedek, the “seal of justice” to be awarded to kosher food producers that meet a detailed set of ethical standards, are about to be tested by American food companies. The seal would be added to products that already merit a hekhsher, or symbol certifying that a food item is kosher, to show that the product not only meets Jewish dietary laws, but comports with Jewish moral values, as well.

Beginning in January, several producers of kosher food will attempt to follow guidelines for everyday business conduct in five principal categories: labor, animal welfare, consumer issues, corporate integrity and environmental impact. The draft standards for these guidelines fill 150 PowerPoint pages. The companies’ efforts will be audited by Social Accountability Accreditation Services — an experienced social responsibility auditor based in New York City — with results to be announced in March.

Testing the standards represents the closest step yet to demonstrating “that Jewish ethical concerns that are based on who we are as a people are just as certifiable as Jewish ritual concerns,” Rabbi Morris Allen, a Minnesota pulpit rabbi, told the Forward. Allen is the project director of the Conservative-backed Hekhsher Tzedek Commission, which was formed in early 2007 after revelations of poor labor conditions — on top of previous exposés of brutal animal treatment — at the Agriprocessors kosher meat plant in Postville, Iowa, shocked some Jews into activism around the practice of kashrut.

“This is a serious religious undertaking to help restore a culture of kashrut in America. Kashrut itself suffered a black eye as a result of some of this,” said Allen, who hastened to note that many kosher food producers have always behaved ethically. Covering everything from employee access to binding arbitration, the nutritional value of the food produced and recycling resources within a factory, the standards represent “the most exhaustive and comprehensive undertaking in the kosher food marketplace ever attempted,” he added.

Allen said that the Hekhsher Tzedek Commission has signed agreements for testing with two companies and is closing in on a third. He would not name them, because the parties have signed confidentiality agreements that Allen said are aimed at promoting honest and robust testing of the standards. One of the companies is a kosher-specific producer, while the other two produce kosher food along with nonkosher products, he said. Allen called them “significant players in the food industry — and in the kosher food industry.”

Some major players in kashrut, however, aren’t as excited. Asked whether people in kosher circles are buzzing over either Magen Tzedek or the “Jewish Principles and Ethical Guidelines (“JPEG”) for the Kosher Food Industry,” released early this year by the Rabbinical Council of America, which represents Orthodox rabbis, some authorities said it’s quiet on the ethical-advancement front.

Rabbi Menachem Genack, rabbinic administrator of the Orthodox Union’s Kashrut Division, said, “I don’t hear them talking about either one.” Rabbi Sholem Fishbane, executive director of the Association of Kashrus Organizations, also said, “It’s been pretty quiet. I haven’t heard any movement at all on these things.”

Genack, who visited Agriprocessors during the crisis, and whose O.U. now certifies the successor company, Agri Star, said, “I frankly would be surprised if this really took off.” It’s hard to pay for the additional infrastructure, and companies are mostly interested in the marketing aspect of certifications, Genack said — meeting federal safety regulations keeps them busy enough.

“I’m interested just to see how it works out,” he said. “I don’t know. I don’t have a clue.”

Magen Tzedek is one of several initiatives that sprang from the collapse of Agriprocessors, which was the nation’s largest producer of kosher meat until its harsh treatment of animals and laborers came to light (largely through reporting in the Forward). Immigration raids on its workers followed, along with the indictment and imprisonment of CEO Sholom Rubashkin, and the plant’s bankruptcy and closure in the fall of 2008.

Although many Jewish consumers and kashrut authorities have backed the Brooklyn-based Rubashkin family, other critical responses have surfaced. In addition to the RCA’s “JPEG,” the Orthodox social justice group Uri L’Tzedek now grants a Tav Ha-Yosher, or ethical seal, to kosher restaurants around the country that meet basic standards for fair treatment of workers.

Because that initiative focuses on the comsumption end, while Magen Tzedek examines production, Uri L’Tzedek’s director, Rabbi Ari Weiss, calls the efforts “complementary.” (Kosher restaurants comprise a relatively small market share, while more than 40% of all food manufactured in the United States bears a kosher certification.) “The more rabbinic organizations and rabbis and leaders in the community who are talking about the significance and importance of ethics in both the workplace and kosher production — I think that’s an amazing thing,” Weiss said.

The Hekhsher Tzedek Commission released its “Standards for the Magen Tzedek Service Mark” in September 2009 and invited the public to comment. Joe Regenstein, professor of food science at Cornell University and an official adviser to the effort, said he received input from about 10 people, activists on various sides of the issue, which helped him fine-tune the standards that the beta-testing companies will use this winter. Their experience likely will lead to further retooling in 2011, Regenstein said.

Magen Tzedek’s project manager, Rabbi Iris Richman, wrote in an e-mail that audits “will take place both on factory floors as well as within the offices of these companies, where records, logs, and documentation will be reviewed. These auditors need not be Jewish nor do they require knowledge of kashrut, because the applicant facilities will already be kosher-certified.… The facilities themselves that apply for certification pay for audits, and auditors travel to the sites themselves, where they review documents, inspect the facilities, and interview workers confidentially. The exact details of these visits are being finalized as we speak.”

Although the Agriprocessors plant, bought by Orthodox Jewish Canadian plastics manufacturer Hershey Friedman in July 2009, can expect its practices to be scrutinized in the months and years to come, spokesman Jeff Pigott says the company isn’t eager to participate in the Magen Tzedek effort. “Right now, Agri Star has kosher certification they’re comfortable with, and they’re not looking for additional certification,” Pigott said.

For now, at least, the Magen Tzedek effort will be focused elsewhere. “This is not about Postville,” Allen said. “This is not just about one company in one state. This is about who we are.”

Contact Karen Loew at loew@forward.com

Ethical Kosher Seal Nearing Marketplace for Conservative Jews

Conservative movement’s ambitious ‘Magen Tzedek’ in testing stages, hoping to have certified products on store shelves within year.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Rivka Oppenheim
Special To The Jewish Week

With the trials of Sholom Rubashkin, the former CEO of the Agriprocessors kosher slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, still looming large over the kosher food industry, the Conservative movement is ready to make its mark on a field that is dominated by Orthodox companies.

After years of discussion and planning, the “Magen Tzedek” — which the Conservative movement calls the world’s first Jewish ethical certification seal — will complete beta testing with two food companies by the end of 2010.

“Our expectation is, a year from now, to have 15 companies that will be promoting the Magen Tzedek,” said Rabbi Morris Allen, project director of Hekhsher Tzedek, the commission that has developed the seal.

Rabbi Allen, 55, spoke to The Jewish Week before participating in a session at this year’s Rabbinical Assembly convention, on “Moving Magen Tzedek in the Marketplace: How the Conservative Movement is Seating Itself at the Kosher Table.”

Conservative rabbis from all over the United States and Canada crowded into the chapel of the Upper West Side’s Congregation Ansche Chesed Monday night to get an update on the initiative, which began in 2006 — two years before federal agents raided the Agriprocessors plant.

Meanwhile, Tav HaYosher, a more modest initiative launched by the Orthodox social justice organization Uri L’Tzedek one year after the Rubashkin raid, has just marked its one-year anniversary — with 40 participating establishments in five states.

Rabbi Michael Siegel, national co-chair of the Hekhsher Tzedek Commission, acknowledged some people’s frustration with the slow pace of his project.

“People in your congregations are saying ‘Nu? Hurry up,’” he said.

Rabbi Siegel, who is senior rabbi of Anshe Emet Synagogue in Chicago, asked every congregation to appoint an ambassador who will sign on for a one-year commitment, promoting the Magen Tzedek mission throughout the Conservative movement.

“It won’t simply be the rabbis pounding on the bima,” he said.

The Magen Tzedek is not intended to replace kashrut certifications, such as the Orthodox Union’s seal of approval. That’s why Professor Joe Regenstein, who drew up the guidelines for the Hekhsher Tzedek Commission, refuses to actually use the term “hekhsher tzedek.”

“That caused confusion and unnecessary concern,” he told The Jewish Week.

Regenstein, head of the Cornell Kosher and Halal Food Initiative, told the audience at Ansche Chesed that besides fruits and vegetables, which don’t need a heksher, any Magen Tzedek-certified product would also need to have kosher certification.

“Pork sausage is not going to qualify, no matter how good [the plant is] at social justice,” he said.

Hekhsher Tzedek will consider five issues in awarding its seal of approval: labor (wages and benefits, and health and safety); animal welfare; consumer issues; corporate integrity; and environmental impact.

A social auditing firm, Social Accountability Accreditation Services has been hired to help develop and implement the standards. Rabbi Siegel said he plans to work with ROI Ventures, a strategy firm, to look into the economic sustainability of Magen Tzedek.

Whereas Tav HaYosher lists only three criteria on its website, all of them issues that already fall under existing U.S. labor laws — the right to fair pay, the right to fair time (one day off per week, compensation for overtime, breaks etc.) and the right to a safe work environment — the Magen Tzedek standards go well beyond legal requirements. A summary version is available on the Magen Tzedek website.

After opening the set of standards to public comment last fall, Regenstein prepared a response for every single one.

“It’s got to be something that’s objective, auditable, fair,” said Regenstein, a professor of food science at Cornell. “The process needs to be transparent.”

And while Uri L’Tzedek works only with restaurants and grocery stores, Regenstein has bigger plans for the Magen Tzedek, which he hopes to promote internationally.

“It would be a jam processor in North Dakota who is already kosher-certified, to a Kraft, to a Unilever,” he told The Jewish Week.

Rabbi Siegel went even further, telling the assembled rabbis that there have been discussions about giving Magen Tzedek to synagogues — ensuring that fair labor practices are enforced in houses of worship, not just in restaurants and factories. An article in the Forward newspaper this fall noted that the labor standards Magen Tzedek calls for in the food industry are met in few Conservative synagogues and other movement institutions, many of which, according to that article, do not pay a “living wage” or health benefits to custodial and other part-time staff.
Like the Magen Tzedek project, Shmuly Yanklowitz, founder and president of Uri L’Tzedek, is hoping to keep growing.

After receiving Orthodox rabbinical ordination from Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, the 28-year-old will move to Los Angeles next month to launch his organization on the West Coast.

Yanklowitz says in the past year, 60 compliance workers have been trained to help enforce the standards of the Tav HaYosher, and that the movement now has “thousands of constituents.”
“I think that the community momentum is immense right now,” he said. “Our constituents are really demanding rapid response. I think there’s not patience for long, drawn-out processes.

“We’re at a crucial stage for the development of the ethical kashrut narrative and for the identity of the concerned Jewish, socially conscious consumer.”

Asked about expanding the Tav HaYosher to other areas besides food, Yanklowitz said that conversation is premature, and that there is a “danger of overextending.”

“We really need a serious victory on creating social change in kashrut first,” he said.

The measure of that victory? When “those that are not complying will need to comply in order to stay afloat.” Already, he said, “multiple owners have told me they’ve gotten thousands of dollars more business because of the Tav.”

Rabbi Menachem Genack, CEO of the Orthodox Union’s Kashrut Division, is skeptical over Magen Tzedek’s potential impact on the kosher food industry.

“I don’t see many companies willing to sign on to a standard that’s different than what’s in place, in terms of government regulations,” he said.

While Rabbi Genack said he’s willing to sanction the Magen Tzedek symbol appearing next to the OU’s, he also said the government should be the ones to handle labor issues — even as he slammed the government over its handling of the Rubashkin case.

“Everything it did was an overreaction,” Rabbi Genack said. “It destroyed a company. It destroyed the economy of the region. ... Asking for a life sentence was an absolute outrage.

“I think the one that should be in the dock is the U.S. Attorney. That’s where I think there’s an ethical outrage. The justice that was done is more reminiscent of Soviet jurisprudence.”

Sholom Rubashkin is currently being tried by the state of Iowa on child labor charges. He faces 83 counts of child labor violations. Federal sentencing has been postponed until June 22, after Rubashkin was convicted last November of 86 counts of bank fraud.

After initially pushing for a life sentence, prosecutors have asked for a 25-year sentence, which Rabbi Genack says is “essentially still a life sentence” for the 51-year-old Rubashkin.

Unlike Rabbi Genack, Magen Tzedek’s Rabbi Allen said relying solely on government inspectors to enforce labor laws might not be the best course of action.

“The mine disaster in West Virginia and the oil spill off the coast of Louisiana have demonstrated that oftentimes the government is unable, or becomes too involved, to be able to stop certain kinds of industry practices,” said Rabbi Allen, spiritual leader of Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights, Minn.

“We wouldn’t trust New York law when it came to ritual law. We shouldn’t necessarily simply trust American law when it comes to upholding Jewish ethical norms, either.”

JTA contributed to this report.

Conservatives’ ethical seal nearing kosher marketplace

By Amy Klein · May 25, 2010

NEW YORK (JTA) -- “We will not put a hechsher on pork products.”

Counterintuitive as the need for that statement about kosher certification might sound, it was just one of the points about the Conservative movement's planned ethical seal that the group responsible for the certification wanted to clarify at this week’s gathering of Conservative rabbis in New York.

The Hekhscher Tzedek Commission announced at this week's Rabbinical Assembly convention that it had hired a social auditing firm to compile standards for what the seal will represent. The Magen Tzedek certification has been in development for three years following multiple scandals at the nation’s largest kosher meatpacking plant, Agriprocessors of Postville, Iowa.

Beta testing with two companies will be finished by the end of 2010.

“Over the course of the next year we will be in the marketplace,” promised Rabbi Morris Allen, the Hekhsher Tzedek project director and spiritual leader of Congregation Beth Jacob in Minnesota.

Joe Regenstein, an adviser to the Hekhscher Tzedek Commission and professor of food science at Cornell University, said the new certification will cover five areas: wages and benefits; health and safety of workers; animal welfare; environment and sustainability; and a broad category of corporate responsibilities, such as nutritional labeling and good practices.

At the convention panel at which the certification was discussed -- “Moving Magen Tzedek Into the Marketplace: How the Conservative Movement is Seating Itself at the Kosher Table,” the co-chairman of the Hekhscher Tzedek Commission, Rabbi Michael Siegel of Anshe Emet Synagogue in Chicago, urged the dozens of rabbis in the room to make the commission's projects known to their communities.

The commission wants each synagogue to appoint one socially aware and active member to work directly with the commission for a year.

Siegel also urged the audience to make sure that their synagogues and Jewish organizations are in compliance with the ethical standards espoused by the seal, such as using fair labor practices for workers and ensuring that outside contractors, like catering companies, adhere to the standards.

“We have to set the right example in our own synagogues. It's a serious issue,” he said. “This will be our Achilles heel if we don't address it.”

The commission hired Social Accountability Accreditation Services (SAAS) for help in coming up with the standards a food company must meet in order to be approved for the Magen Tzedek, or star of justice. The commission posted draft standards at the Magen Tzedek Web site for three months, inviting public comment, and now the standards are being finalized.

“We think that social justice in the marketplace is something that we can make happen,” said Eileen Kaufman, executive director of Social Accountability International, which accredits and monitors organizations as being in compliance with social standards. “What we do at SAAS is take creditable standards and put them in a structure that enables them to be carried out and used as criteria for purchasing. That proves as incentive for organizations to follow them.”

At first the label will be targeted toward U.S. kosher food product companies, Regenstein said, estimating the number at about 10,000. It will include only products that already have been certified as kosher, including non-food items like detergents and aluminum foil, as well as products that do not require kosher certification, such as fruit and vegetables.

Even though some companies might adhere to the social justice practices enumerated, if they are not kosher, they cannot get the seal.

“We are a Conservative Jewish organization. We will not put a hechsher on pork sausages. That's just not who we are,” Regenstein said. The Magen Tzedek is “tied to Jewish ethics and to Jewish law. The companies have to meet a minimum of Jewish law.”

Regenstein prefers to call the accreditation the Magen Tzedek rather than use the term hechsher.

“The word hechsher means kosher certification, and this program is not kosher certification,” he said. “This is a social justice program attached to previously recognized kosher certification.”

Regenstein added that the term hechsher made the Orthodox community nervous.

“They thought, and perhaps rightfully so, that we were going into the kosher certification business," he said. "We are going into the ethical certification business.”

For now the seal will not apply to restaurants. Other organizations, like Uri L'Tzedek, certify kosher restaurants as ethical.

Eventually the Hekhscher Tzedek Commission hopes to certify catering companies.

After the SAAS criteria are finalized, the commission will conduct an economic feasibility study to determine the cost of accreditation, Regenstein said.

He noted that it might prove economically desirable for kosher companies to acquire the seal because it will widen the market for their foods to those who care about ethics even if they don’t keep kosher.

“By tying it to kosher products, you will have more Reform and Conservative Jews looking at products that are kosher,” Regenstein said. “They can reach the entire Jewish community and people outside the community looking for a framework to choose ethical products.”

The seal may even help people become kosher observant, he said.

“All of a sudden it's not just people who keep kosher” who will be eating kosher products, Regenstein said, “but people who are interested in social justice.”

Label Says Kosher; Ethics Suggest Otherwise

By PAUL VITELLO
Published: December 10, 2008
The New York Times

What it means to be kosher — the nub of a debate sparked in May by sweeping labor abuse charges against the Orthodox Jewish owners of the largest kosher meatpacking plant in the nation — was pondered Tuesday night in a panel discussion at Yeshiva University in Upper Manhattan, the academic nexus of Orthodox Judaism.

It was, for the most part, a subdued and scholarly discussion about ritual law, Jewish ethics and what to do if you suspect that the kosher meat on your table has been butchered and packed by 16-year-old Guatemalan girls forced to work 20-hour days under threat of deportation, as alleged in a recent case.

“Is it still possible to consider something ‘kosher certified’ if it is produced under unethical conditions?” asked Gilah Kletenik, one of the organizers of the student group that arranged the session, which drew an overflow crowd of 500, most of them students.

In keeping with the Talmudic tradition embodied by the rabbis on the panel, the answer seemed to be yes and no.

“The basic underpinning of Jewish tradition is ethics,” said Rabbi Menachem Genack, a Yeshiva dean and the chief executive of kosher certification for the Orthodox Union, the group that oversees kosher standards in 8,000 food manufacturing plants around the world, including about 25 meatpacking facilities in the United States.

But he said the process of producing food that is certifiably kosher according to Jewish law is one thing; the conditions in which that process is undertaken are another. “The issues are not obvious sometimes,” he said.

In a more pointed comment, Rabbi Avi Shafran, who has defended the prerogative of the Orthodox rabbinate against what he sees as well-meaning but misguided efforts to add social-justice protections to the criteria for the production of kosher food, said, “Lapses of business ethics, animal rights issues, worker rights matters — all of these have no effect whatsoever on the kosher value.”

The realm of kashrut, or Jewish dietary law, which for 5,000 years has been the exclusive domain of orthodox authorities, has received new scrutiny from a broad spectrum of Jews since federal agents raided an Agriprocessors plant in Postville, Iowa, on May 12, arresting 389 illegal immigrants. The owners, Aaron Rubashkin and his son, Sholom, members of a prominent Orthodox family in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, were charged with bank fraud and employing under-age workers.

After the raid, workers’ organizations said that many Agriprocessors employees had long complained of frequent accidents and forced overtime but did not take their claims to the authorities because they feared deportation.

The workers’ stories gave a boost to a kosher-reform campaign known as Hekhsher Tzedek (in Hebrew, kosher righteousness), which was begun in 2006 by Rabbi Morris J. Allen, a Conservative rabbi from Mendota Heights, Minn., who has long promoted ethical reforms in kosher meat plants.

Rabbi Allen said on Wednesday that though he “would have loved” to have been invited to the discussion, “the important thing is that the topic of what constitutes good kosher food production has been elevated.”

“We are proud that people in all parts of the Jewish community are taking our agenda seriously,” he added.

The four-member panel was composed of Rabbi Genack, Rabbi Shafran, Rabbi Basil Herring — executive director of the Rabbinical Council of America, an Orthodox group — and Shmuly Yanklowitz, whose views probably came closest to those of the reform-minded Rabbi Allen.

Mr. Yanklowitz, a recent Yeshiva graduate and co-founder of Uri L’Tzedek, which describes itself as “the Orthodox social justice movement,” told the audience he had visited Postville and met a former Agriprocessors employee named Maria, a young woman from Guatemala.

“Maria worked in hot, slavelike conditions from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. so that we could have our kosher meat,” he said.

In an extended address that was at times Jeremiah-like in its condemnations, he called on the audience to rise to “a higher moral standard” in addition to adhering to the strict guidelines of kashrut as defined by traditional Jewish law.

“The consumer of goods produced immorally is morally culpable,” he said.

At the moment, Mr. Yanklowitz’s group has focused mainly on improving conditions for workers in kosher restaurants.

Rabbi Allen’s group has proposed something more comprehensive and problematic for Orthodox authorities: a seal of approval, the Hekhsher Tzedek seal, which he proposes adding to kosher products whose producers meet certain standards of employee safety and benefits, humane treatment of animals and environmental protection.

The campaign has received support from prominent members of the Conservative and Reform movements, but so far not from Orthodox circles, despite general agreement that worker protections are important in kosher food plants.

What may seem to reformers to be a mistaken separation of Jewish ritual law and Jewish ethics, however, is seen by the Orthodox as a defense of tradition.

“There is nothing in Jewish law that conflates the status of kosher food with the way the food is produced,” Rabbi Shafran said in a phone interview Wednesday. “What sticks in our craw,” he said, referring to the proposed seal, “is that it is following the zeitgeist rather than following the law. It falsifies the integrity of Jewish law.”

To be clear, he said, “Ethics is vitally important in Judaism.” Unethical acts, like illegal acts, should be punished according to the laws that apply. But the rules of what defines food as kosher were written in the Torah by divine agency and cannot be changed, he said.

Shlomit Cohen, 21, a senior at the university’s Stern College for Women and president of the Social Justice Society, a student group representative of a new wave of social activism among young Orthodox Jews, said she appreciated Rabbi Shafran’s point of view and “his desire to retain respect for the authority of legal tradition.”

“But this is more than a technical legal issue,” she said. “Change is needed, and if it is not coming from the leadership we have, it will have to come from others.”

Support for Hekhsher Tzedek

The Union’s Executive Committee unanimously approved a resolution, “Worker Rights, Ethical Consumerism and the Kosher Food Industry,” which follows closely on the heels of the CCAR’s resolution on the subject. It urges Reform congregations and their members, whether or not they have elected to observe kashrut, to consider the guidelines to be established by the Hekhsher Tzedek Commission when purchasing food products and, in general, to become more ethically aware consumers. The full text of the resolution is available online.

Conservative Movement Finds Unity In Promoting New Hekhsher Guidelines

By Anthony Weiss
Thu. Sep 11, 2008

The Forward

Two years after a bruising debate on sexuality that left some wondering if the Conservative movement was irreparably divided, an initiative to link kosher food regulations with labor and environmental standards seems to have reunited the movement’s rabbinate.

A number of rabbis have agreed to devote at least part of their High Holy Day sermons to the initiative, which is known as Hekhsher Tzedek, Hebrew for “justice certification.” In late July, the committee spearheading the initiative released the guidelines that will be used to judge food producers, but the High Holy Day push ensures that the move will be widely discussed when synagogue attendance is at its highest.

Rabbis and leaders of the Conservative movement who spoke with the Forward were universally positive about Hekhsher Tzedek, a display of unity that would have been astonishing only two years ago.

“It’s something that is obviously one people can get behind, because who is opposed to tzedek?” said Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, referring to the Hebrew word for “justice.” “Among rabbis, I think it’s a great relief to be able to talk about tzedek.”

In 2006 Rabbi Morris Allen of Minnesota started the kosher food initiative in response to reporting by the Forward about labor conditions at the giant Agriprocessors slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa.

The moves by Allen and his commission came at the height of the movement’s earlier problems. In December 2006, the movement’s committee on Jewish law passed a legal opinion paving the way for same-sex marriage and gay and lesbian ordination. In response, four rabbis promptly resigned from the committee in protest. Earlier this year, four synagogues in Toronto, where opposition to the sexuality rulings had been particularly high, voted to leave the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the umbrella group for Conservative synagogues.

As the same-sex marriage debate unfolded, the Conservative movement’s numbers were dwindling and some observers warned that the movement might be coming apart at the seams.

The new certification program has drawn anger from many leaders of Orthodox Judaism, but the blend of ritual, ethics and food seems to have formed a powerful combination that has spoken to the various strands within the Conservative movement.

“There’s no divisiveness on this,” said Ray Goldstein, international president of the USCJ. “Everywhere I go, people are speaking about it. Rabbis have gotten passionate about it, and also laypeople.”

The most striking element of the support has been that it has come from both sides of the earlier debate about sexuality. Rabbi Loel Weiss of Temple Beth Am in Randolph, Mass., had opposed the liberalization of the movement’s strictures on homosexuality, but he has spoken out in favor of the new movement.

“This is one of the very few examples where the movement has come out to modify Halacha in a more vigorous, dynamic way,” Weiss said. “This is one of the most exciting developments that the Conservative movement has produced over the last two decades.”

Likewise, rabbis who pressed for the new rulings on sexuality have been supportive.

“I think this is a real moment of definition for the Conservative movement,” said Menachem Creditor, rabbi of Congregation Netivot Shalom in Berkeley, Calif. “If this translates into something that’s visible, the Conservative movement will have achieved something it hasn’t done in a long time, which is translating a profound idea into personal action.”

Observers suggest that one thing making Hekhsher Tzedek so unifying is its combination of Jewish law and a socially liberal mission. Where these impulses parted ways on issues of sexuality, they have been fused together in Hekhsher Tzedek.

“Gay ordination became a symbol of the fault lines between the halachists and the post-halachists” in the Conservative movement, said Steven Bayme, director of the American Jewish Committee’s contemporary Jewish life department. With Hekhsher Tzedek, Bayme added, “suddenly, you have an issue that bridges that gap.”

Within Orthodox Jewish streams it has been exactly this fusing that has caused concern. A number of Orthodox rabbis have said that Jewish law about the proper treatment of employees should be kept separate from Jewish law about the preparation of kosher food. These rabbis have argued that kosher supervision should focus on ritual food preparation while issues like labor rights and environmental regulation should be left to the government.

“[L]aws, halachic and otherwise, are already in place to ensure proper treatment of animals, workers, consumers and the environment; and ignoring any of them renders a company subject to punitive action by federal and state agencies,” wrote Avi Shafran, a spokesman for the ultra-Orthodox umbrella group Agudath Israel, in the September 8 issue of the Jewish Observer. “To the extent that an envisioned new ‘badge of approval’ simply reiterates those requirements, it is superfluous. And where it aims to go further, beyond halachic and/or governmental strictures, it overreaches, and can serve only to make mischief.”

Shafran went on in the article to accuse the Conservative movement of using Hekhsher Tzedek as “a bald attempt to portray itself as something other than dwindling and desperate,” citing the recent divisions over sexuality issues.

Even within the Conservative movement, there are still questions about whether the excitement about the initiative among the clergy will translate into greater participation by ordinary members. A number of rabbis also warned that consumers must see concrete examples of the Hekhsher Tzedek on the shelves of their supermarkets if the initiative is to hold people’s attention. The rabbis who lead the commission have said that they hope to provide the first evaluation of kosher companies within the next year.

Slaughterhouse case fuels kosher justice movement

By RACHEL ZOLL

NEW YORK (AP) — Very little goes unexamined in the kosher world.

From meat and poultry to the coating on vegetables and the ingredients in mouthwash, rabbis who determine whether a product meets Jewish dietary laws scrutinize the most minute details about all things consumed.

For religiously observant Jews, that concern has rarely extended beyond the product itself.

But now, allegations of worker abuse at the nation's biggest kosher slaughterhouse have some Jews demanding that food companies be judged not just by the purity of their products but by the way their treat their employees.

"How can you sit at your table and eat a product packaged by a pregnant woman has been standing on her feet all day?" asked Rabbi Morris Allen of Minnesota. He is developing a certification program that aims to protect workers and the environment in the kosher industry.

Interest in Allen's "hekhsher tzedek," or "certificate of righteousness," has ballooned since a May 12 immigration raid at Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa.

Nearly 400 illegal immigrants were arrested at the plant in the biggest such raid on a single work site in U.S. history. State officials say dozens of underage workers were employed there in violation of child labor laws. Agriprocessors has denied any wrongdoing.

Many Jews are embarrassed and angered by the allegations and, along with some religious leaders, are rethinking what it means to be certified kosher.

The "hekhsher tzedek" would be awarded to companies that pay fair wages, ensure workplace safety, follow government environmental rules and treat animals humanely, among other criteria.

The program, which could begin as soon as next year, would be separate from the traditional certification process that measures compliance with Jewish dietary law. A company that fails to obtain a "hekhsher tzedek" could still get its food certified as kosher.

Allen, of Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights, is developing the program through the United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism and its Rabbinical Assembly, to which he belongs. Conservative Judaism holds a middle ground between the liberal Reform and strict Orthodox traditions, allowing some innovation in Jewish law to adapt to modern times.

But it's unclear how much of an effect the certificate would have.

The majority of kosher consumers and certifiers are Orthodox, and they drive the multibillion-dollar U.S. market. Kosher meat is more expensive than standard food, and since large families are the norm among the Orthodox, some fear any changes could increase the cost.

Rabbi Menachem Genack, chief kosher executive of the Orthodox Union, the largest kosher certifier in the U.S., called Allen's idea unreasonable and unenforceable. He said the Orthodox Union relies on federal and state agencies — "who have both the expertise and authority" — to monitor plant conditions.

Yet, pressure for change is coming from more than just Conservative Jewish leaders.

Within the Orthodox community, there are signs that Jews in their 20s and 30s are gaining interest in what the Torah says about social justice.

Last year, young Orthodox Jews in New York formed Uri L'Tzedek, an advocacy group on issues such as immigration and labor rights. Leaders of the group, whose name means Awaken to Justice, collected about 2,000 signatures in support of a boycott of Agriprocessors.

They suspended the action when the owners hired a former federal prosecutor as a compliance officer, but are still going ahead with a fact-finding tour of the plant this week, where they will also meet with immigrant workers.

"The younger generations of modern Orthodox Jews are seeking new meaning to their religious expression, going beyond survival and anti-assimilation and just text study," said Shmuly Yanklowitz, a rabbinical student and co-founder of Uri L'Tzedek. "There have been countless individuals who have felt estranged from the Orthodox community who have been in touch with us. We're getting hundreds of e-mails saying that this has filled a gap."

Despite sharing the ideals of the "hekhsher tzedek," Yanklowitz said his group does not support the proposal. He said any systemwide change in kosher production will have to come from within the Orthodox world because of its "overwhelming commitment" to following Jewish dietary law and the buying power that brings.

Still, Conservative Jewish advocates for the justice certification believe they can bring moral pressure for change.

Rabbi Avram Reisner of Baltimore, a member of the panel of religious law scholars that guides Conservative Judaism, has written a 20-page analysis of Jewish law on wages, working conditions and other business issues in support of the "hekhsher tzedek."

"The Conservative movement has hauled the Orthodox establishment out in a way they hadn't anticipated," Reisner said. "We're not looking to horn in on the business. We're looking to expand the envelope so the kosher consumer can buy things that they feel good about."

Kashrut and Ethics

A new poll at The Jewish Press: Should a company's kashruth supervision be removed if it is found to have violated laws and ethical standards having nothing to do with kashruth?

Yes, kosher should be about more than just food. 77% No, a kosher seal approval is only about food, nothing else. 23%

(Results as of 1:00 p.m. 28 May 2008)

Reconsidering AgriProcessors Products

Published: 05/22/2008

The leadership of the U.S. Conservative movement is urging Jews to consider not patronizing AgriProcessors, the nation's largest kosher slaughterhouse.

In a joint statement released Thursday evening, the movement's Rabbinical Association and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism declared themselves "shocked and appalled" at working conditions at AgriProcessors, which is under federal investigation for employing illegal aliens. The groups asked their members "to evaluate whether it is appropriate to consume Rubashkin products until this situation is addressed."

The advisory extends not only to products bought retail but also to meat and poultry bought at restaurants and for private functions such as weddings and bar mitzvahs. The statement falls short of the boycott hoped for by the more activist wing of the Conservative rabbinate, and leaves the decision in the hands of the individual consumer.

Still, Rabbi Morris Allen, head of the movement's hekhsher tzedek commission, said that "it is the first statement from the organized Jewish community that reminds people they need to evaluate the food they purchase and eat" from an ethical perspective.

No other Jewish movement has issued a statement on the issue.

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, head of the Union of Reform Judaism, said it was appropriate that the Conservative movement take the lead because unlike the Reform movement, the Conservative movement calls on its members to keep kosher. Noting his own "deep distress" at the news coming out of Postville, Iowa, where AgriProcessors is located, Yoffie said it is "absolutely" time for the Jewish community to demand similar investigations into all kosher slaughterhouses, because the case "has raised suspicions about all kosher food."

Rabbi Menachem Genack, head of the Orthodox Union's kosher department, the largest kosher certifier of AgriProcessors, said the O.U. is awaiting the outcome of legal proceedings against the company before coming to any decision. If AgriProcessors is found guilty of criminal charges, he said, the O.U. will withdraw its kosher certification. Meat and poultry produced by AgriProcessors is sold under the following kosher and non-kosher labels: Aaron's Best, Aaron's Choice, David's, European Glatt, Iowa Best Beef, Nevel, Rubashkin's, Shor Habor, and Supreme Kosher.

You Shall Not Abuse a Needy and Destitute Laborer (Deuteronomy 24:14)

A Statement by the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism
And the Rabbinical Assembly
Regarding Rubashkin's Meat Products

New York, NY (May 22, 2008)

In light of continuing disturbing allegations of unacceptable worker conditions at the Agriprocessors Plant in Postville, Iowa, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism and the Rabbinical Assembly are united in calling for a thorough evaluation by kosher consumers of the appropriateness of purchasing and consuming meat products produced by the Rubashkin's label.

Rubashkin's produces kosher meat primarily under the Aaron and David label at the Agriprocessors facility. It is a major producer of kosher meat and poultry in the United States. The allegations about the terrible treatment of workers employed by Rubashkin's has shocked and appalled members of the Conservative Movement as well as all people of conscience. As Kashrut seeks to diminish animal suffering and offer a humane method of slaughter, it is bitterly ironic that a plant producing kosher meat be guilty of inflicting human suffering.

The Rabbinical Assembly and United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism will immediately release an advisory to its members and constituents to evaluate the appropriateness of consuming Rubashkin products until the current situation is addressed. This advisory extends not only to products purchased on the retail level but to meat and poultry consumed in restaurants and at private functions, such as weddings and bar mitzvahs.

As the month of Sivan approaches, Jews throughout the world are mindful of the Torah's message of the power of Kedushah, holiness as it applies to all aspects of our lives including the ethics of worker treatment and food production. It is hoped that Conservative synagogues, schools and summer camps engage in a study of this important topic in honor of the festival of Shavuot which begins on the sixth day of Sivan -- commemorating the giving of the Torah.

A valuable source for such study is the paper written by Rabbi Avraham Reisner , entitled Hekshsher Tzedek Al Pi Din. This paper is a companion to the Hekhsher Tzedek Policy Statement and Working Guidelines. The paper is available on the websites of the Rabbinical Assembly and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism [and here].

By releasing this advisory, the Conservative Movement endorses the vision and guidance of the Hekhsher Tzedek commission. Hekhsher Tzedek is an initiative of the Rabbinical Assembly and United Synagogue that seeks to create an ethical certification process for kosher food. Through its work, Hekhsher Tzedek seeks to strengthen the bond between Halakha and Social Justice.

The reports of unacceptable worker conditions at the Agriprocessors plant demonstrate the pressing need for the sort of ethical oversight which might be provided by Hekhsher Tzedek.

For further information about the advisory being released by the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism and the Rabbinical Assembly, or to request an interview with any member of the Hekhsher Tzedek commission, the Rabbinical Assembly or United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism please call or email: Shira Dicker (212.663.4643) or Steve Rabinowitz (202.265.3000).


ABOUT THE UNITED SYNAGOGUE OF CONSERVATIVE JUDAISM

United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism represents and supports the synagogues of the Conservative movement in North America. We work with lay leaders and Jewish professionals on the national, regional, and grassroots levels to teach, inspire, and motivate Conservative Jews to live lives increasingly filled with Jewish learning, ethical behavior, spirituality, and mitzvot.

ABOUT THE RABBINICAL ASSEMBLY

Founded in 1901, the Rabbinical Assembly is the international association of Conservative rabbis. The Assembly actively promotes the cause of Conservative Judaism, publishes learned texts, prayer-books and works of Jewish interest, and administers the work of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards for the Conservative movement.

Rabbis of the assembly serve throughout the world in congregations, on campus, as educators, hospital and military chaplains, teachers of Judaica and officers of communal service organizations. Its membership spans over 20 countries and numbers 1600 rabbis.

SHIRA DICKER MEDIA INTERNATIONAL
Creative Communication Consultants
438 West 116th Street, Suite 43
New York New York 10027
office: 212.663.4643 mobile: 917.403.3989 fax: 212.428.6762

Widespread Worker Abuses Alleged At AgriProcessors

Federal affadavit could open door to indictment against top kosher meat supplier.

by Debra Nussbaum Cohen
Staff Writer
The Jewish Week
May 14, 2008

Two legal experts suggested this week that the federal government could be laying the groundwork for possible indictments against the owners of the country’s largest kosher meat manufacturer.

The comments come in the wake of Monday’s raid on AgriProcessors’ slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, when federal authorities entered the plant and arrested 390 workers — more than a third of the company’s workforce — on illegal immigration charges. On Tuesday, 29 workers were charged with crimes including identity theft and using false social security numbers, according to a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office.

“It’s clear [from the affadavit’s allegations] that the government is thinking of an up-the-ladder chain of getting either the whole corporation or some senior managers,” said Marc Stern, general counsel to the American Jewish Congress, who reviewed the affadavit. “There are clearly some supervisors who are at great risk with being charged with harboring aliens in systematic fashion. There’s also a tantalizing thing in there about different-colored paychecks that suggests a slush fund for paying illegals.”

“Whoever from the corporation is involved with that is at great risk,” Stern continued. “They [the government] lay the groundwork for such a charge. But whether they can prove it beyond a supervisory level or will even attempt it is too early to say.”

The affidavit filed by a senior special agent of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement department lists dozens of pages of allegations against the company’s owners and supervisors. The document portrays them as exploiters of a vulnerable illegal immigrant work force, and it could be seen as setting the owners and supervisors up for possible indictment.

Allegations include that company owners and supervisors physically abused and exploited workers; knowingly hired workers without legal documentation; altered work records; paid some off the books; and paid them below minimum wage (starting workers at $5 an hour).

In addition, the affadavit alleges that company owners and supervisors fraudulently and forcibly sold them used cars and trucks, threatening that they would be fired if they didn’t buy the vehicles.

“Our company takes the immigration laws seriously,” AgriProcessors said in a statement, adding that it cooperated with the government “in the enforcement action” and will continue to operate during the investigation. It also assured consumers that it is continuing to supply glatt kosher meats and poultry.

AgriProcessors produces about 60 percent of the kosher meat and 40 percent of the kosher poultry in the U.S market.

Washington attorney Nathan Lewin, who has represented AgriProcessors and its owners, the Rubashkin family, in the past, conveyed surprise this week at the breadth of the affadavit’s allegations.

The “fact is there was a lot of material in there that did not seem to be relevant [to the immigration charges]. It has all sorts of allegations [against the owners and supervisors], all sorts of information gleaned from all sorts of places,” he said.

“Whether or not charges are brought against the Rubashkins, that remains to be seen,” Lewin said. He said he does not yet know if he is representing AgriProcessors in this current matter.

He added that he did not believe the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Rubashkins were in talks at the present time.

The affidavit also alleges that an informant saw evidence of methamphetamines being manufactured at the plant.

In the wake of Monday’s raid, the country’s leading kosher supervising agency, the Orthodox Union, expressed concern about the situation.

“The different issues, like immigration, we don’t have expertise or authority in that area but will follow the authorities’ lead,” said Rabbi Menachem Genack, the OU’s kashrut administrator. The OU is one of the two current kosher certifiers of AgriProcessors products, and the most widely accepted.

“We’ll see where this leads in terms of determinations the government makes,” Rabbi Genack said. “If they find that the company is culpable we will respond. In terms of some of the claims, like drug use, they [the Rubashkins’] say that it’s not true, but I will wait to see what the determination is. If workers there make drugs, whatever it is, and without sanction of management, then it wouldn’t affect us. But if it was with the knowledge of the company then it would affect us,” he said.

If the government concludes that the company’s owners were culpable, “It certainly would be something we would be concerned about,” he said.

The federal investigation dates back to last November, and involved sending in undercover workers who recorded conversations about buying false employment documents.

Beyond the challenge of finding new (and legal) workers to replace those arrested this week, the incident and other related investigations could mean major problems for AgriProcessors’ owners, Brooklyn-based Aaron Rubashkin and his son, Rabbi Sholom Rubashkin, who runs the Iowa plant.

Officials at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement department and the U.S. Attorney’s office said that they could make no comment as to whether the Rubashkins will be charged.

Sholom Rubashkin did not return a message left on his cell phone.

At the same time, the U.S Department of Labor and Iowa Department of Labor are investigating AgriProcessors practices. In March, the Iowa Division of Labor Services levied $182,000 in fines against AgriProcessors for 39 health and safety violations.

There are troubles for the company even beyond the realm of the government. One of the company’s three kosher supervising agencies recently terminated its relationship with the meat maker.

K’hal Adath Jeshurun, based in Washington Heights, ended its supervision of all AgriProcessor products effective April 15. Rabbi Moshe Edelstein, KAJ’s kashrut administrator, would not say why the step was taken. A letter KAJ officials sent to Aaron Rubashkin in December, however, made it clear that the AgriProcessor owner had appealed the supervising agency’s original decision to terminate the relationship, a conclusion it upheld.

These are far from the first problems AgriProcessors has faced over the past few years.

Aaron Rubashkin bought the Postville plant in 1987 and brought in people local Iowans had never before seen — Lubavitch chasidim, along with an influx of Hispanic workers.

There were tensions between the locals and their new neighbors. Then the vegetarian group PETA: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals took aim at AgriProcessor’s practices.

PETA sent an undercover worker to the Postville plant in 2004 who videotaped what the organization describes as inhumane treatment of still-sentient cows during their slaughter.

PETA did the same at the Rubashkins’ Gordon, Neb., plant in May 2007. AgriProcessors eventually changed the way it slaughters cows in response to the criticism.

The United Food & Commercial Workers International Union has been trying to organize factory floor laborers at AgriProcessors as well, with an aggressive campaign that includes a Web site and an automated phone call campaign to people they identified as leaders in the Jewish community, warning them against AgriProcessors’ meats.

But despite the crises, AgriProcessors’ business has recently been on the upswing, said Menachem Lubinsky, editor of KosherToday.com, who also has a public relations firm and is representing the Rubashkins.

(Lubinsky said Agriprocessors is not the only slaughterhouse to have been recently raided by immigration authorities. “It’s not an aberration for I.C.E., they do this all over at meat plants.”)

AgriProcessors kosher meat brands are: Aaron’s Best, Aaron’s Choice, Rubashkin’s, European Glatt, Supreme Kosher, David’s, and Shor Habor. Two-thirds of their product is non-kosher (since kosher meat can come only from part of an animal), and is sold through retailers including Wal-Mart, Trader Joe’s and Pathmark.

While no one knows for sure what the privately held company earns, a Dunn & Bradstreet report pegs Rubashkin Industries’ annual income at $84.9 million. Family members’ business interests are diversified beyond meat, and into real estate and other ventures. Sales of kosher beef and poultry in America are about $300 million annually, according to industry sources.

What remains unknown is the impact of this week’s raids on AgriProcessors’ short-term business. The company released a statement this week stating, “there will be no shortage in the supply of glatt kosher meats and poultry.”

According to Lubinsky, “They have a lot of different resources at their disposal.”
In addition to the Iowa and Nebraska plants, the company also owns slaughterhouses in Uruguay and Argentina.

“As a company, they have more than the usual number of resources to tap into. It’s not as if even if this plant shuts down they’re out of business. The company thinks it will be able to maintain the level of production and supply. I don’t know how, but that’s what they say,” said Lubinsky.

But it is having an impact. While AgriProcessor was up and running, though at reduced production, on Tuesday, the Midwestern cattle markets were down “because AgriProcessor wasn’t buying,” said Bob Teig, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The plant had halted operation on Monday after the federal raid.

Local distributors and retailers predicted that prices for kosher meat will rise even more as a result of the AgriProcessor problems.

AgriProcessors’ problems could be a boon for one new group, feeding demand for a “Heksher Tzedek,” or “Just Stamp of Approval.”

The nascent Heksher Tzedek Commission, which is affiliated with the Conservative movement, intends to ensure that companies to which it awards its approval meet a range of ethical, as well as ritual, standards.

“This underscores the need for it,” said Rabbi Morris Allen, a Conservative rabbi in Minnesota who is director of the Heksher Tzedek Commission. “The fact that the Jewish community has seemingly allowed kosher food to be produced in a way that potentially exploited laborers, this is the reason we need to be reassured that when we buy kosher food, it’s with the best values being employed, both in ritual and ethical aspects of Jewish law.”

His group issued a statement this week saying they “condemn the corrupt practices of AgriProcessors which resulted in a raid by government agents. The actions of this company have brought shame upon the entire Jewish community.”

Jews going beyond ‘kosher’

Food producers would win seal for business ethics

by Ed Stannard
New Haven Register Metro Editor
Sat, Apr 19, 2008

As Jews worldwide prepared for this evening’s Passover Seder, they were careful to buy kosher meat and other foodstuffs, prepared according to ancient law and custom.

For a number of Jews, however, the rituals of kashrut do not go far enough. The working conditions at the kosher slaughterhouses and other food-processing plants are also important, they say.

Concerned about labor issues, corporate responsibility and environmentalism, Hekhsher Tzedek, a project born in Conservative Judaism, plans to certify companies that fulfill ethical standards. The name translates as “justice certification.”

“The Hekhsher Tzedek project is still relatively new and it’s not completely defined,” said Rabbi Jon-Jay Tilsen of Congregation Beth El-Keser Israel in New Haven, who plans to publicize it in his congregation.

Keeping kosher requires observant Jews to avoid “unclean” foods, such as pork and shellfish, to separate meat and dairy and to use only foods that have been prepared according to rituals of purity. Many Jews have separate dishware for meat and dairy meals, and two additional special sets for Passover.

The Hekhsher Tzedek Commission has been meeting with companies and labor organizations and plans to release a list of products that meet the ethical standards, though using the Hekhsher Tzedek seal will be voluntary. Rabbi Morris Allen of Mendota Heights, Minn., director of the project, said the list will be released later this year.

Hekhsher Tzedek expands the ethics of eating beyond kosher rituals to include other Jewish laws dealing with treating people fairly and dealing honestly in the commercial sphere.

“Traditionally, people have looked at these Jewish texts as silos — one in this field, the other in that area,” said Allen.

The Hekhsher Tzedek seal will be given to foods produced according to standards of fair wages and benefits, worker training, ethical corporate behavior and environmental impact, according to a policy statement issued by the commission.

Some Jews believe certification should be limited to the kosher laws, that other issues are addressed by state and federal laws and regulations.

Tilsen disagrees. “The idea is that there are a number of laws, particularly labor laws and environmental law, that are part of Jewish law, just as much as the law of kashrut, kosher law,” he said.

While voluntary, “It’s kind of like a Good Housekeeping seal for labor practices and environmental practices,” Tilsen said.

It would help Jews, as well as non-Jews, who are concerned about how their food is prepared to know what products to buy. “It really is the law already, but we really have no way to know whether we’re complying with it,” Tilsen said. “This will give people a way to comply with this area of Jewish law.”

Tilsen said the connection to Passover is easy to see. “Part of the message of Passover has to do with the dignity of labor, the meaning of labor. There’s nothing wrong with working, but it’s a question of working traditions and who you’re working for.”

Another concern is, “At Passover time, many Jewish families invest a great deal of attention into the details of food — ‘kosher for Passover’ — and it’s easy to lose the greater picture.”

Allen said, “What Hekhsher Tzedek really represents is an attempt to demonstrate that Judaism at its core wants us to be concerned with ritual as well as ethics and vice versa. Both ritual and ethics need to be present at all times.”

Rabbi Lina Zerbarini of Yale University Hillel said she is not involved with Hekhsher Tzedek but sympathizes with the project’s intent. Even as a vegetarian, she must deal with the complexities of the supermarket, she said.

Zerbarini said she buys eggs from cage-free chickens rather than from commercially farmed chickens confined to small cages. “One of the downsides of cage-free eggs is (the hens) are running around with the roosters, which means half of them are fertilized, so they’re not kosher,” she said. It’s a difficult choice to toss out fertilized eggs versus buying the commercial brands, she said.

Admitting that “I’m not where I’d like to be in my personal observance of these issues,” Zerbarini said everyone should grapple with them, though many do not.

“I think some of it is how much we’re willing to know. It’s very easy not to think about where our food is coming from. It just shows up in the supermarket. But how we spend our money is important.”

Ed Stannard can be reached at estannard@nhregister.com or 789-5743.

In the Diaspora: 'Hechsher tzedek'

Samuel Freedman , THE JERUSALEM POST
November 29, 2007

Midway through his now-famous letter from the city jail in Birmingham, Alabama, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. defended the ongoing protest marches against segregation by quoting the prophet Amos: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." At another point in the letter, he referred to the passage in the Book of Daniel in which Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, under threat of death, refuse to bow before the gods of their Babylonian conquerors.

King meant his letter primarily to chastise the moderate clergymen of Birmingham, most of them Christian, who considered the movement's direct action too radical. And in doing so, he cited many religious figures in the Christian sphere, from Jesus and St. Thomas to Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich.

Even so, then and now, King's words carried an unexpected, unintended rebuke for Jews committed to social justice. One of the whopping paradoxes of the civil rights movement was that the Jews who comprised a disproportionate share of white activists and volunteers were largely ignorant of the theological roots of their idealism. With some rare rabbinic exceptions like Abraham Joshua Heschel and Jack Rothschild, they had to learn their own Bible from the black Christians in the campaign.

The divide between religious knowledge and social action persists in American Jewish life. In the parts of the Jewish spectrum with the strongest involvement in tikkun olam, particularly among the secular and unaffiliated, there is the least awareness of the Judaic foundations of that concept. (In fact, there is often an antipathy to religion itself as mere superstition.) In the parts with the deepest knowledge of text and tradition, particularly the Orthodox sector, a formidable apparatus of charities exists almost entirely to serve internal needs.

ONE OF the reasons that American Jewish World Service under the leadership of Ruth Messinger has become such a phenomenon, I am convinced, is that it has overtly connected activism (in the form of Peace Corps-like projects in developing nations) to a disciplined, ongoing study of Jewish texts. It has taken its young volunteers past that inchoate, uninformed sense that there's something sort of Jewish about doing social justice.

Occupying the unstable center of American Jewish life, a place defined more by what it isn't than what it is, the Conservative movement has struggled over the years to reconcile contemporary Jewish political impulses with traditional Judaic religious injunctions. Now at least a partial reconciliation is at hand, and it is one with relevance and resonance far beyond the Conservative movement alone.

A rabbi in suburban Minneapolis-St. Paul, Morris Allen, has led the movement to create a new form of kosher certification, which he calls a hechsher tzedek. As the name implies, this certification would reflect a commitment to justice on behalf of kosher food companies rather than solely their adherence to the laws of kashrut in food preparation.

Put another way, the hechsher tzedek puts the treatment of human beings at least on a par with the treatment of an animal. Many of the humans in question are Latino immigrants who have filled the labor vacuum in slaughterhouses across the United States and been the victims of both exploitative bosses and nativist bigots. The plant that first caught Rabbi Allen's attention several years ago is Agriprocessors in eastern Iowa. The facility, which is owned by a Lubavitcher family and produces the most kosher meat of any plant in the United States, has been controversial for nearly a decade. First the journalist and author Stephen Bloom, in his book Postville, depicted the Hassidic owners and managers not as the rescuers of a depleted local economy but as harsh, rigid outsiders. A series of articles by Nathaniel Popper in the Forward detailed the below-market wages and dangerous conditions in the plant.

While Agriprocessors inspired the hechsher tzedek, if "inspired" is the word, the certification plan would cover the entire $11.5-billion-a-year industry. To earn the hechsher tzedek, an employer, meaning in most cases a large corporation, would have to pay wages consistent with regional rates, provide employees with health care and vacation benefits, and offer safety training to workers in a language they understand, among other requirements. The hechsher tzedek would augment rather than replace existing certifications, most of them issued by Orthodox va'ads.

AT THIS point, the plan is moving gradually yet steadily closer to becoming reality. The Rabbinical Assembly, the organization of Conservative rabbis, has formally endorsed it. The Nathan Cummings Foundation, a respected institution in Jewish philanthropy, has given a $50,000 grant. At its biennial meeting this week, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the movement's congregational arm, is taking up a detailed paper citing the textual bases for the hechsher tzedek in the Tanakh, the Talmud and Shulhan Aruch.

Those citations, at least as I read them as a lay person, make a sensible, unforced link between Judaism and this particular form of social justice. As a theological treatise for labor rights, it reminds me of the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum, a cornerstone of trade unionism in the 20th-century West. It helps, too, that Rabbi Allen was a prominent advocate for increasing kosher observance in Conservative circles before taking up this cause. No one can accuse him of discovering kashrut just in time to change the rules.

I have a hard time imagining that more Jews would become kosher as a result of hechsher tzedek, but the size of the kosher food market suggests that many Jewish consumers, while indifferent to most of the dietary laws, still buy kosher meat for reasons of sentiment, solidarity or perceived quality. How many of them naively think that glatt - a concept, indeed a social construction, that barely existed in the United States before World War II - connotes some higher kosher status, when it's more like higher price?

So just as idealism and commerce have fruitfully commingled in the booming sales of hybrid cars and the campus protests against sweatshop labor, this kind of cross-pollination could find its Jewish expression in hechsher tzedek. It could provide a living object lesson in the relevance of tradition to modernity, and of the inextricable interplay of Judaism and what we like to think of as a Jewish set of values.

And, for once, we wouldn't need a Talmud Torah lesson from a Baptist preacher to get the point.

Holiness and Justice: A Fair Trade Approach to Keeping Kosher

Fair Trade News
by Hilary Johnson, LFTN board member
Listen to Rabbi Allen's Interview

Rabbi Morris Allen, of Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights, MN, has been promoting kashrut, Jewish dietary laws, to his congregation for twenty years. He says that kashrut provides “a way in which we as Jews understand a daily opportunity to sanctify our lives, to create a sense of holiness and a sense of awareness of God in our lives.” This consciousness means that Allen takes his food and its production seriously.

More than a year ago, Allen learned of labor abuses at an Iowa kosher meat processing plant that supplied the Twin Cities Jewish community. He was faced with a contradiction: The worker may slaughter an animal according to the laws of kashrut, but he or she may be underpaid and mistreated. What if the ritual is observed, but the ethics are undermined?

Allen distinguishes between “ritual,” the letter of the law that describes specific procedures for kosher slaughter and food handling, and the ethics of how kosher food is actually produced. While he does not privilege one over the other, he thinks current certification practices do. According to Allen, “kashrut has become more and more concerned with whether or not the lung of a cow is smooth, but has forgotten that the hand of the worker is just as important. That’s what heksher tzedek is all about.”

Heksher tzedek, or justice certification, is Allen’s answer to the contradiction of the ritually correct but underpaid worker. Working with a myriad of groups, including local and national committees and nonprofits, as well as a Boston consulting firm, he began creating the heksher tzedek after his trip to Iowa. They are now in the process of defining standards and determining the method of certification. The standards cover six areas: Health & Safety, Wages & Benefits, Training, Environmental Impact, Corporate Transparency, and Product Development. Allen stresses that worker and manager participation has been essential to creating meaningful guidelines within these areas, and that transparency is key to a rigorous certification process. As an example, he describes a hypothetical company that claims to offer health benefits to workers, but upon auditing worker paystubs, certifiers might find no deductions for premiums, indicating that no one is actually signed up for the benefits. Allen gives as one possible reason for this the fact of large numbers of plant workers being migrant workers, many of whom speak or read little English.

Immigrant workers are at the center of the U.S. food system, from production to processing. The heksher tzedek standards, therefore, require that workers receive training in their native languages. As to the larger question of whether a company technically violating the law by employing undocumented workers should receive a heksher tzedek, Allen says that such workers are so prevalent that they virtually form the backbone of U.S. industry. He asserts that legislation like last spring’s Sensenbrenner immigration bill, which would have required deportation of millions of undocumented workers, would bring the kosher meat industry “to a screeching halt overnight.”

The heksher tzedek campaign is not uncontroversial in the Jewish community. Orthodox Jews have traditionally performed kosher certification, and Rabbi Allen's movement is made up in large part of Conservative Jews. Critics question the validity of certification by non-Orthodox Jews, but Allen insists that the heksher tzedek will not be replacing Orthodox kosher certification. He believes it could even bring Jews back to kashrut who have abandoned it because of the common focus on ritual over ethics. He says that the heksher tzedek “is a way to demonstrate our concern for the vertical relationship between ourselves and God and also the horizontal relationship between ourselves and other people.”

Allen believes the heksher tzedek will have appeal to non-Jews as well. He says non-Jews already look for the kosher label for reasons of their own, including concern for food safety. Allen, like many in the fair trade movement, firmly believes that people want to do the right thing, and that they will, when given the choice.

Like fair-trade certified products, items with the heksher tzedek are likely to cost more than those without. Because of the inspection and certification costs, kosher food in general, especially meat, usually costs more than non-kosher food. But Allen points out that being able to buy cheap food often comes with a hidden cost: Exploitation of workers. If the meat costs a little more because the workers who processed it got paid better and received benefits like health care and sick time, he says, “then I would say that’s what it takes in order to demonstrate that keeping kosher really has impact, not only on my own life, and my own relationship to God, but to the society in which I live.”