Erica Schwartz discusses the most recent case in New York (The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 6, subscription required) -- Governor Pataki's "Emergency Kosher Law Protection Act of 2003."
It's intended to cheer up disheartened kosher consumers who were upset when the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of a decision declaring New York State's kosher laws unconstitutional. Those laws, which required foods to satisfy Orthodox guidelines of kashrut in order to be labeled kosher, were challenged by the Yarmeisch brothers, whose Commack Kosher Deli and Market in Commack, N.Y., is under the kosher supervision of a Conservative rabbi. Oy vey is mir.
The old "Is it really kosher?" question is nothing new in the Jewish community, especially in the Orthodox Jewish community where the rules are that much more stringent. As those of us who've grown up in this tradition know, foods and restaurants are constantly falling in and out of kosher stardom.
We can all remember the days of eating Hydrox chocolate sandwich cookies instead of Oreos (if you've never heard of Hydrox, count yourself lucky) and the days of avoiding M&Ms as if they were chitlins. There were the days of walking past Krispy Kreme and trying to convince ourselves that Dunkin' Donuts were every bit as good and of watching our less religious friends nosh on the Hebrew National and Shofar hot dogs at Yankee Stadium. (No one who speaks Hebrew or has ever heard the shofar blown actually accepts these certifications). Fortunately, today, Oreos, M&Ms and Krispy Kremes are all kosher even by Orthodox standards, and a kosher stand accepted by all Jews now sells dogs in The House That Ruth Built. (Or was it Rebecca?)
The point is, each Jewish community has rabbis to help sort through these issues, local religious councils to give us the "go ahead" or the "stay away." My rabbi has told our congregation not to trust the kosher certifications at our neighborhood deli, but another rabbi has surely told his community to make certain that when they go, they order the stuffed cabbage. Different communities hold by different levels of kashrut, and so it goes with every aspect of Jewish law. The irony here is that while "kosher laws" seem to be directed at satisfying the more observant Jew, it is actually the less knowledgeable Jewish diner for whom the kosher laws were constructed in the early 1900s.
"The original intention," explains Rabbi Menachem Genack, rabbinic administrator of the kashrut division of the Orthodox Union, "was to protect unknowing consumers who went looking for kosher meat and ended up with horse meat" (horse is inherently an unkosher animal). On the other hand, for those Jews who carefully adhere to halacha, or Jewish law, no amount of assurance from New York State can compare with the certification or disapproval from a trusted rabbi. This is why food establishments that claim to be kosher post their certifications in the window with the name of the supervising rabbi -- leaving it to the consumer to decide whether that kashrut is sufficient or lacking.
If the state is determined to better the lives of kosher Jews, what authorities can and probably will do is make sure that each market or restaurant's sign is not just some meaningless certification written in a compelling Semitic script, but an accurate and truthful representation of that establishment's level of supervision. For the state to do anything more would, well, not be so kosher.
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