Offbeat Israel: Kitchen Appliances Visit the Mikveh
By Nathan Jeffay
Of all the characteristics Israelis have been blessed with, electrical safety is not one of them. Bare wires are a common sight. Earthing appliances is seen as a quaint indulgence a bit like wearing ties — popular abroad but not part of the culture here. And oy, the love affair with splitter sockets.
One doubts there’s any country in the world with as high a number of many five-way electrical splitter sockets as Israel. Everywhere you go, home, office or restaurant, the current runs around the place via splitter socket upon splitter socket. It’s easy to wonder whether the whole country is plugged in to a single socket in Jerusalem through an elaborate arrangement of splitters and extensions chords.
In the last few years, a couple of factors have come together to make things even more dicey — a trend for kitchen gadgetry and increasingly strict religious standards in the Orthodox world.
According to Jewish law, some kitchenware, crockery and silverware items need to be toiveled on acquisition. This means that they need immersing in a mikveh, a ritual bath. Different rabbis take different views on what items need toiveling, with some saying pretty much everything and others taking a minimalistic approach.
July 10, 2009, 2:40pm
Big Brother: Kashrut Edition
By Devra Ferst
Israel is a spiritual place — a place where many say they can always feel God watching over them. Thanks to two newly proposed virtual monitoring initiatives — a virtual kosher supervisor and cemetery guard — God may not be the only one watching.
The Chief Rabbi of Beersheva, Yehuda Deri (brother of former Shas leader Aryeh Deri), recently proposed the installation of kosher surveillance cameras in restaurants and bars in the city that are open late, Ha’aretz reported. The cameras would replace expensive late-night kashrut supervisors by sending a video feed to a central kashrut-supervising agency, which would monitor the kitchen’s activity.
While some look forward to the savings, others claim that the effort would violate their privacy.
In the same week, the Religious Services Ministry began to push for surveillance cameras to prevent vandalism of gravesites on the Mount of Olives, just outside of the Old City, according to the Jerusalem Post.
The mountain is home to 70,000 graves that date back as far as biblical times, such as those of Zecheria and Absalom. Among its more modern resting members are Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of the British Mandate, and former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
Israel, look out, Big Brother is watching.
January 26, 2009, 12:40am
‘Thin Mints, the Rabbi Said, Are His Favorite Girl Scout Cookie’
By Daniel Treiman
News flash: The kosher-certification symbol was inadvertently omitted from boxes for Thin Mints Girl Scout cookies, leading to at least a little bit of confusion. This morsel of news comes to my attention not via Kosher Today, but rather from this Sunday’s New York Times, which devoted a whole news article to the tasty tidbit. And, yes, the text in the title of this post is taken verbatim from this odd little article in the newspaper of record.
September 5, 2008, 7:00pm
Agriprocessors’ Bi-Coastal Critics
By Daniel Treiman
Agriprocessors — the kosher meat giant that has been in the national spotlight ever since its Iowa slaughterhouse was the target of a massive federal immigration raid in May — is taking flak from critics east and west.
The Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe both published editorials yesterday assailing Agriprocessors for its treatment of its workers. This time, however, the focus isn’t on allegations of mistreatment of workers at its Iowa plant (a story our Nathaniel Popper broke back in 2006).
Instead, the papers are unloading on Agri over its efforts to prevent workers at its Brooklyn distribution center from unionizing (another story Nathaniel broke for the Forward, this one just last month).
Both papers take aim at an attempt by Agriprocessors to void a 3-year-old vote in favor of unionization by its Brooklyn workers. The company has filed an appeal with the Supreme Court arguing that workers who are in the country illegally have no right to unionize, a position that, both papers note, flies in the face of a 1984 Supreme Court precedent.
June 3, 2008, 7:46pm
The Jewish Press Leans (a Little Bit) Left for a Change
By Daniel Treiman
The Jewish Press, the nationally distributed, Brooklyn-based Orthodox weekly, can be counted on to lean pretty far to the right when it comes to both politics and religion. That’s why I was pleasantly surprised by a pair of remarkably progressive (by contemporary Orthodox standards) opinion articles on two hot-button religious controversies that were published last week by The Jewish Press.
May 14, 2008, 2:23am
America’s Biggest Kosher Plant and Largest-Ever Immigration Raid
By Daniel Treiman
Agriprocessors is racking up the records. Its Postville, Iowa, facility was already America’s biggest kosher meat plant. Now, it also can claim to be the site of what federal officials say is the largest immigration raid in U.S. history.
The JTA has some more on the raid. Also, check out the extensive coverage from the Des Moines Register.
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