New regulations for Yom Kippur chicken ritual?

JERUSALEM POST – The Knesset Economic Affairs Committee has rejected new directives issued by the Ministry of Agriculture for regulating the custom of kapparot, a practice conducted before Yom Kippur and in which a live chicken is ritually lofted over a person’s head before being slaughtered.

United Torah Judaism MK Uri Maklev threatened during the hearing that if the regulations were upheld his party would topple the government, while committee chairman and Zionist Union MK Eitan Cabel said that the new regulations were overly stringent and would, if implemented, prevent the performance of the kapparot ritual.

The custom has become increasingly controversial as animal rights groups have argued that the ritual entails significant suffering to the birds, including being left for hours and even days in small cages, frequently without food and water, and often outside in the sun.

Kapparot can also be performed by substituting the chickens with money that is donated to charity afterwards.

Last year, the Agriculture issued strict guidelines preventing the slaughter of chickens outside of permanent slaughterhouses, which led to vigorous opposition from parts of the haredi community which is accustomed to performing the Kapparot custom.

In order to allow slaughter outside of a permanent slaughterhouse, the Ministry of Agriculture issued new guidelines of late which included strict regulations on transportation times for the chickens, the presence of veterinarians and inspectors at slaughter sites, and various stipulations to ensure that the chickens do not suffer during the process.

In addition, it would be up to the head of the local municipal authority to permit slaughter outside of slaughterhouses as long as the Veterinary Services Administration was satisfied that the regulations were being upheld.

According to Attorney Simcha Rottman, who submitted a High Court Petition last year against the Ministry of Agriculture’s regulations, the current guidelines require that a mobile slaughterhouse be erected at every site where which he claimed would cost at least NIS10,000, while the manpower required for inspection of the sites would also be hard to supply and finance.

The chairman of the Association of Veterinarians agreed with Rottman that the regulations essentially require a road-side slaughterhouse to be erected and that such a demand was not realistic.

Cabel said that he could not approve regulations that would turn people into criminals but that a balance needed to be found between allowing the custom to be performed and protecting animals from unnecessary suffering.

“I will not issue regulations that the public cannot uphold,” Cabel said, adding that giving the authority for banning or permitting slaughter outside of slaughterhouses to local municipal authorities was not a desirable situation. He asked the ministry to formulate a different arrangement and provide the required inspection.

A representative of the ministry said however that the ministry was not authorized to provide inspection outside of permanent slaughterhouses.

Maklev said that those wishing to organize and perform the ritual do want to uphold certain standards and regulations but that the current regulations would prevent the custom being performed in the open and that “Jews in Israel will be forced to do kapparot underground.”

The Kapparot custom is not mentioned in the Torah or the Talmud, and several important rabbinic figures have opposed the performing the ritual with chickens, including the 12th-century Spanish sage Maimonides and Rabbi Yosef Karo, a 16th-century scholar who lived in Spain, Turkey and Israel and authored the central codification of Jewish law in use today.

Karo wrote that the tradition of using a chicken for Kapparot should be avoided, out of a concern that it was originally a non-Jewish practice.

Rabbinic authorities from Ashkenazi communities nevertheless approved of the custom and ruled that it should be continued.

The animal rights group Anonymous for Animal Rights organization said following the hearing that the kapparot process involved suffering to the chickens and pointed out that rabbis such as Karo and others have opposed the custom.

“The kapparot ritual, chickens are delivered cramped cages during a period of many hours and wait for slaughter while in crowded conditions, scared, thirsty and hungry,” the group said.

“It’s cruel and unnecessary to harm chickens when it as possible to perform the custom with money and then donating it to the poor, a practice that expresses giving and mutual responsibility. On the day of self-accounting [Yom Kippur], it is appropriate that we think about our relation to society’s most vulnerable creatures, animals.”