Jerusalem – The last straw for Topolino, an Italian restaurant in Jerusalem, was the lettuce. The Jerusalem Rabbinate requires restaurants that want a kashrut certificate to use only hydroponic produce, commonly known as “Gush Katif,” because it’s bug-free.
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“You can’t work with this lettuce,” said restaurant owner Shai Gini. “It’s not tasty, and you need three or four Gush Katif lettuces for every ordinary head of lettuce I’d buy in the [open-air] market.” So Gini decided that Topolino would make do without a kashrut certificate.
For Yoni Vadai of the Carousela cafe, it was the rabbinate’s kashrut inspectors. And for Levana Cohen of the Adon Cohen restaurant, it was her conviction that she “could teach the inspector about kashrut.”
All are part of a small but growing trend in Jerusalem: restaurants – at least seven so far – that keep kosher and serve a religious clientele, but aren’t certified by either the rabbinate or the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox ) kashrut organization, Badatz.
People familiar with the phenomenon say it is part of a more general trend: Israelis who care about observing Jewish law, including kashrut, but want nothing to do with the official rabbinate. Other aspects of this trend include weddings, funerals and even conversions in which the rabbinate is uninvolved.
The Rabbanut should be privatized – no reason tax money should be going for religion in a democratic country. It is assur to have a Jewish State before Moshiach comes, and it is the presence of the Rabbanut as a government officr that violates this issur.
That’s right. The Children of Israel took their hydroponics setups, light boxes and magnifying glasses with them into the wilderness.
A company can’t realistically watch its own books. Hired supervision is the only responsible way to go.
democratic country???
Reluctantly, I can understand the restaurateurs’ point of view, for two reasons:
1. They are being over-supervised. There is absolutely no reason in halacha (or in hygiene, either) for restaurants to use hydroponic salad vegetables – if the cooks are prepared to properly check them. Commentator #4 is absolutely correct in what he has written.
2. The “tail is beginning to wag the dog”. In other words, who manages the restaurants? Their owners or the mashgichim?
The fact that the restaurateurs have reached a point in their relationships with the supervisory bodies that they are quite prepared to forgo supervision, and to depend on their reputations, should be a red light for all of us, but especially the batei din leminehem.
They (the batei din) are beginning to shecht the geese that lay the golden eggs they depend on for their income – and their very existence.
I remember a Thursday morning, a few years ago, where I got up in the morning and all of a sudden: you couldn’t drink the water and you couldn’t wear your shaitel. All on the same day!!! No warning! I felt like I had landed on a foreign planet and couldn’t speak the language. Bugs in the water!!!! Avoda Zarah in my shaitel!!!! If you come up with problems instead of solutions – and some people might get the wrong idea that the solutions are actually a way of creating demand for new products – you are going to meet resistance.
1) The latest rulings on bugs go beyond the pale of anything people for the past 3,000 years had the technology to meet.
2) A rule in halacha is “Ain omrim dovor she’ein haam yochol laamod bo.”
The latest rulings on bugs go beyond the pale of anything people for the past 3,000 years had the technology to meet.
The Rabis have to stop and think, “What have we been doing so wrong that over the past two centuries 95% or more of all Jews have abandoned torah yiddishkeit?.”
I don’t believe these companies object to supervision per-se. They object to stupidities and higher costs. So non-Gush Katif lettuce is now traif? Check it for bugs. It costs 3 times as much and has no taste at all. Gourmet restaurants care about taste and flavor of food.
But once you have gotten rid of Hasgacha, what’s to stop them from buying meat that hasn’t been salted k’halacha. Maybe it tastes better without the salting.
I sympathize with the restaurant owners but I wouldn’t trust them to provide their own supervision.
I think we should wear filters on our noses and mouths- after all we might breathe in gnats or some other insects How in the world did out ancestors drink water from a running stream or well and did not filter their water-Oh My. I will definitely support THESE restaurants.
This is strictly a business decision and nothing more. To my knowledge, there is no halacha that says that a restaurant must have an official Hashgocha to be “Kosher”. IMHO a paid third-party Hashgocha is not fundamentally different from an owner giving his own Hashgocha, in terms of trustworthiness. They are both businesses.
I wouldn’t eat in a restaurant that didn’t have a good mashgiach.