Minister of Religious Services Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan plans to establish a kashrus police force. Currently, there is a very small force which is officially assigned to the Prime Minister’s Office, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel Kashrus Enforcement Unit. The unit is composed of a handful of inspectors who are responsible for enforcing state kosher law around the country. While the unit does an admirable job there are two major problems. Firstly, there are not enough inspectors and secondly, the unit is too often busy enforcing state law which is not always in line with kashrus and halacha. That is to say if a store has a legitimate hashgacha but lacks a local rabbinate supervision as compelled by law, it is cited for a violation.
When the unit publishes its periodic reports to the public, it states a business lacks proper kashrus but it does not detail if it truly has no supervision or simply lacks local rabbinate supervision, once again a violation of the law, not halacha.
To read the entire article use this link to access the Jerusalem Kosher News website.
(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
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4 Responses
You deleted the last line of the article and made it seem like this was about improving kashrus. The line you left out was “Perhaps the new kashrus police will generate additional state revenue in the form of fines but it is unlikely the new force will improve adherence to kashrus halachos around the country.”
The initiative is designed to put “private” (i.e. hareidi) hecksherim out of business. It is part of a push by the Dati Leumi camp to crack down on hareidim, and to eliminate the problem caused by strict and reliable hecksherim competing with “liberal” government hecksherim.
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When the unit publishes its periodic reports to the public, it states a business lacks proper kashrus but it does not detail if it truly has no supervision or simply lacks local rabbinate supervision, once again a violation of the law, not halacha.
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You neglect to mention that most often a store that has only a private hashgaga has some teuda from a guy who never comes to inspect and just prints a nice “mehadrin” teuda that looks nice but if you take the time to check you’ll find that either no-one knows the guy or the signee is known to be a fraud… (see lots of deli/burger places in Jerusalem).
I just come to this site to see the brilliant comments of the aka pooka baal teshavooka
Enforce a Halacha? I thought this government only wants to shmad.