High costs discourage Europeans from keeping kosher

High costs discourage Eu

By MATTHEW WAGNER
The extravagantly high price of kosher food - especially meat - is preventing European Jews from adhering to Jewish dietary laws, thus blurring their Jewish identity, a group of rabbis who met in Brussels warned this week. "The current prices of kosher food in Europe makes it extremely difficult for tens of thousands of Jews to obtain kosher food," said Rabbi Aryeh Goldberg, deputy director of the Rabbinical Centre of Europe (RCE). "Their failure to eat kosher erodes their Jewish identity and their insulation from non-Jewish society," he said. Over 100 rabbis and representatives of leading kosher supervision outfits gathered for a conference organized by the RCE this week. The rabbis discussed various topics, but most emphasis was placed on the question of finding ways to lower the prices of kosher food in Europe, said Asher Gold, RCE's spokesman. An example that was given at the conference was the kosher meat market in Britain, one of the most expensive. The British company Tesco sells a whole, non-kosher chicken at £2. In contrast, a kosher chicken of similar weight costs five to six times more than that - between £10-12. The situation is similar on the European continent, which is split up into two different markets: countries where it is impossible to obtain any kosher meat whatsoever and countries where the prices of kosher meat are prohibitively high. One exception is France, where a large slaughterhouse located in Paris provides meat at a premium of just 25%. Rabbi Jermia Menachem Kohen, Head of Paris's Consistoire [rabbinical court], said that the large economies to scale enable France's 500,000 Jews to buy cheap kosher meat. "Since we have such a large demand the added costs for kosher meat are shared by more people which means that each person pays less," said Kohen in a telephone interview with The Jerusalem Post from Paris. "There are 210 restaurants under out supervision, 70 butchers and 55 caterers and we employ 30 shochets [kosher slaughterers] full-time. That adds up to a lot of kosher food." According to Gold, there are factors that affect the prices of kosher food in Europe that do not apply in other countries. In many European communities there is a special tax imposed on the purchase of meat to help support the community's educational institutions. The panel decided to lobby the communities to lessen these taxes. "Unlike in the State of Israel where [Orthodox] religious services are funded by the government, in Europe the community has to fund its own religious services which means paying a hefty tax," Gold said. The rabbis at the conference explained that the high food prices often place them at a disadvantage when they attempt to present Torah Judaism in a positive light. Many of the members of the Orthodox communities in Europe are not Torah-observant in their personal lives. When a rabbi attempts to persuade a member to begin purchasing the kosher meat made available by his kashruth organization, he is often confronted with the question, "Why should I pay five times as much for the identical meat?" Rabbi Y. Reuven Rubin, rabbi of South Manchester, gave the participants a number of pointers to help deal with these challenges.