Kosher Meat from Uruguay (original) (raw)

Preface to the Israeli Article about Kosher Slaughter in South America

by Temple Grandin
Fort Collins, Colorado
May 2004

This preface is in response to the two people who have asked me to remove an article about kosher slaughter in South America from my web page. The article will continue to appear after this preface.

I have worked as a consultant to the meat industry since 1974. I have visited over 30 different kosher slaughter plants in the United States, Canada and other countries. I have designed equipment for holding cattle and calves prior to and during Shehita. Information on my equipment designs is located on my website: www.grandin.com. I designed and worked on the installation of equipment in two OU (Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations) plants during the mid-eighties and early nineties. In the first plant I worked with Rabbi Solomon B. Shapiro to develop a system to replace the shackling and hoisting of veal calves prior to shehita at Utica Veal in Utica, New York. Rabbi Emanuel Holzer from the Rabbinical Council of America (the OU's rabbinical affiliate) collaborated on this project. In the early nineties I worked with Rabbi Abe Rine from Chicago to replace shackling and hoisting with a modified upright pen that would reduce animal stress at the John Morrell plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The shehita cut was done while the cattle were held in a standing position. This plant exported tongues to Israel and the OU at the time stated that it was their best plant. Unfortunately both Utica Veal and John Morrell are now closed. The John Morrell kosher plant was closed due to a poor business decision made by the conglomerate that owned them. Utica Veal closed due to pressure related to urban growth.

Some other kosher projects that I have been involved in include evaluating animal welfare in Europe with Rabbi Pinkas Kornfeld from Brussels, Belgium. In 2003 I visited an excellent kosher slaughter plant in Toronto, Canada. The cattle were held in an upright position and the shochet was highly skilled, so that over 90% of the cattle collapsed within 10 seconds. Systems using my designs are currently being used by plants doing kosher cattle for Hebrew National and at Aurora Packing in Aurora, Illinois. There are also three U.S. veal plants using equipment based on my designs.

For over twenty years I have been actively involved in improving animal welfare during kosher slaughter. When animal welfare is being evaluated, one must carefully separate the variable of how the animal is restrained from the variable of throat cutting without stunning. These are two separate issues. My work has focused on replacing the cruel shackling and hoisting procedure with a more comfortable method of holding the animals prior to shehita. When a stressful method of restraint is used, it is impossible to evaluate the animal's reaction to the shehita cut because the animal is kicking and bellowing from the stress of the restraint methods.

After I had designed and operated a better restraining device to hold the cattle in a comfortable upright position, I was amazed to observe that the animal did not appear to feel the cut. My work has focused on improving the methods used to hold the animals. I have never attacked shehita. In fact many of my articles support shehita.

Over the years I have worked with many wonderful shochets and rabbis. I totally respect these very sincere people. Rabbi Abe Rine had been a great supporter of my work and when he died it was a great loss to animal welfare and religious slaughter. I have worked with many shochets who were grateful to have the new systems. Eliminating shackling and hoisting of conscious live cattle improves both animal welfare and personal safety for the rabbis and shochets.

The reason I have decided to keep the South American article on my web page is that shackling, dragging, and hoisting of live cattle still continues in Latin America. I visited Chile in 2003 and they were exporting meat to Israel from cattle that had been shackled and hoisted. I have also had several professional colleagues report back to me on their observations of cruel cattle handling methods in South and Central American kosher plants. However, this controversial article has been edited by me (in 2004) to focus on the issues of concern in the plant. The observations in the article are unfortunately consistent with what I have personally observed in kosher plants. I am hopeful that some day I will be able to take this article down, i.e., when animal welfare improves in South America.

Onward Conquistadors

HA'ARETZ Magazine
September 25, 1998

[Material Deleted that was not related to kosher slaughter]

By Yossi Bar-Moha

It's 5 AM. on Monday, August 24, 1998, in the Paso Carasco neighborhood of Montevideo Uruguay. Yehuda Tsanani, 43, an Israeli from Rehasim, a religious village near Haifa is crossing the still-dark street near the Carasco meat factory. Tsanani is on his way back to the two-story building where the team of shohatim (ritual slaughterers) resides. He has just finished a shift of few hours at the plant, supervising the washing of meat that three days ago was on steers sauntering in the meadow. Cut into sections, the meat will soon be packed in cartons for shipment to lsrael.

The heavyset, bearded Tsanani, ..., has been in the Uruguayan capital for three months now with a team of slaughterers and inspectors....

Even at 5 A.M. Tsanani's mind is racing.... Before entering his room - he shares the accommodations with the meat crew, comprised of Israelis and Jews from neighboring Argentina - he wakes up the others. Their workday will begin at 5:45A.M. The head of the group, Rabbi Hanoch Hershkovitz from Bnei Brak, hustles the men; one of them is his ... son Avraham, ....

At 5:30A.M. the team sets out for the factory. The procession is led by Rabbi Hershkovitz and his son, followed by slaughterers Yitzhak Mizrahi and Avraham Eisenberg, two more inspectors and an internal examiner - all from Argentina. Trailing after them are Elimelech Partik, from Bnei Brak, who is an external examiner - he checks the lung after it has been removed from the animal -and Menachem Tubol, ...from Even Yehuda, near Netanya, who until two years ago worked as an inspector for the Chief Rabbinate on slaughter teams sent abroad by the Rabbinate....

Tubol is here as the agent of importer David Bordovich, who works in collaboration with the Hoger Mazon food company. His role is to supervise the slaughter, ensure that the meat is fat-free, and ascertain that the importer's labels are properly attached to the finished product. At the entrance to the factory, which is considered one of the largest and most technologically advanced slaughterhouses in Uruguay, the group is joined by another shohet, Binyamin Katashvili, an ... Orthodox Jew from the town of Kiryat Malachi, on the road to Ashkelon. Katashvili is not staying with the others. He has arrived for work from the center of Montevideo where he resides....

Kosher stamp

As the men enter the factory, Carmen, who runs the store room, hands them a loos fitting white uniform, a white plastic coat, a fiberglass helmet and boots. From inside you can already hear the deep lowing of hundreds of steers that have been transported here in trucks and herded into a large pen behind the factory....

The three slaughterers - Mizrahi, Eisenberg and Katashvili - station themselves in the slaughter cell located on the ground floor. They are joined by Hershkovitz Jr. On the floor above are the internal exaininer and the inspectors, their principal task being to stamp the meat when the time comes. For this they use a long metal rod on one end of which is embossed a large seal, which is dipped into purple ink and then used to stamp the meat. Next to them, on an elevated chair, sits Partik, the external examiner - the innards get to him hanging from hooks via a conveyor belt.

The bulk of the physical work is done by about 20 local workers. Outside, the steers are forced into a long, narrow path between two steel fences, where they are lined up one after the other. The two first bulls are shoved through a raised door into separate large steel containers, each known as a "Box." Once the animal is inside, the steel door descends, but not all the way to the floor: a narrow slit is left at the bottom. Next, air pressure is released from below, pushing up one side of the floor, tipping the steer onto his side, his feet sticking out of the silt.

Stunned by this totally unexpected development, he begins to bellow, his feet thrashing about, desperately seeking a foothold. One of the local workers grabs a back leg of the bull and lashes it to an iron chain. The door is raised again and the bull is yanked violently upward by the chain attached to his back leg. The animal is now dangling in the air its immense weight held by one foot, its head down, A second worker locks the head into a crescent-shaped device that has been grafted onto a long iron rod. The slaughters advance. Eisenberg and Katashvili, holding well-honed, ... knives about half a meter long, each approach a steer. The kill is dazzlingly swift, a second or two, one cut forward and another backward across the bull's neck. It is done.

Immediately the two animals, their bodies jerking convulsively, are lifted upward with the iron chain, unleashing a torrent or blood. Wasting no time, the slaughterers and the workers turn to the ... Box, where the next two steers are already waiting. ... Their bellowing intensifies.

The slaughterers are back in the slaughter cell, where hot water runs constantly from two pipes. They wash the blood from the blades and run a well-manicured fingernail on their right hand along the blade to make sure that it has not become flawed during the act of slaughter. The halakha (Jewish religious law) stipulates that if such a flaw is discovered, the steer is considered a nevela [carrion, not-kosher]... and to eat it is a [forbidden] .... By the time Eisenberg and Katashvili had finished examining their knives, the work of a few seconds, Hershkovitz Jr. and Mizrahi had already slaughtered two more steers. The first team steps up to dispatch steers number five and six, and the precess continues.

In the meantime, the slaughtered animals, by now dangling from large hooks, are pulled up to the second floor, where workers attach them to a gigantic machine. A quick cut loosens a flap of skin, which is inserted into the machine and pulled by two rollers until the animal is completely skinless. The conveyor belt then moves the steer along to the internal examiner. He sticks his hand into the innards to examine physically if the lung is attached by "adhesions" to the ribs. An animal in which no adhesions are found is called "smooth" and its meat is considered kosher lemehadrim (strictly kosher).

If the adhesions contain secretions that have hardened and become stuck to the extremities of the steer's ribs, making them difficult to detach, the intenaal examiner so informs the next stage of the team. He passes on the information by making a large "X" over the representation of the lung on a drawing that has been provided for the purpose. The external examiner, in this case Partik, will thus know that the animal is trefa - found to be afflicted with a probably fatal organic disease and hence foridden, for consumption by halakha.

If the adhesion is soft, or if only, a few soft adhesions are found, the internal examiner conveys this information by showing the place(s) of the adhesion(s) by means of one or more small circles on the drawing. After the innards have been removed from the steer's body, the drawing, together with the animal's actual lungs, come to the external examiner. It is Partik's job to examine adhesions and to decide whether they were caused as a result of a puncture in the lung (in which case the meat is trefa), or whether they are only hardened secretions that have emanated from one of the walls of the lung (in which case the meat is kosher, but, lemehadrin).

Here is how the examination is conducted: One of the workers fits the base of the lung onto an air-hose. The pressure is turned on, filling the lung with air and inflating it. The Jewish external examiner uses his hands to examine the adhesion, or adhesions, after which the lung is thrown onto the tray of the conveyor belt where the steer's innards have be placed. Situated next to the external examiner is a bulletin board with the number of each steer that has been slaughtered, with a small square next to the number; if the steer has been declared trefa due to adhesion problems, this is duly marked with ink in the square.

It is all done with astonishing speed. Neither Partik nor Hershkovitz, the crew chief who took over for Partik as external examiner has time to examine the folds and the other parts of the lung before placing them on the conveyor belt. By this method, more than 100 steers are slaughtered within an hour, 50 per Box, 27 seconds on average for each. ....

Has the slaughter been performed according to the strict letter of halakha? For slaughter to be considered kosher, both the windpipe and the gullet have to be [severed]... No one in the crew checks to see that this has been done. ...In case a flaw is discovered in the knife, an authorized honer of knives is supposed to be present [at the instruction of the Chief Rabbinate], and only he is allowed to correct the impediment. But in Hershkovitz/s crew there was neither an examiner nor a honer of knives. Each slaughterer inspected his own knife and if necessary he sharpened it on a grinding stone.

The halakha warns that the person examining the knife must be calm and collected, and that his hand must not be "heavy" so that he will be able to find any possible flaw in the blade. The pace of the work in Uruguay left no time for a calm and collected inspection: The crew had to keep up a steady rate of slaughter in order to meet the importer's demands.

....

Because of the shortage of working hands, a local inspector, a Chabad [shochet}...named Alberto, was recruited to help out. He supervised the process of koshering the innards - the heart, the brain, the tongue (the remaining sections were sent for koshering to a meat plant in San Jose, about an hour and a half away). The other inspectors were engaged in marking the meat. The ... locals ... pick up the meat and they pour salt on the innards, after they have been washed in water, in order to kosher them.

Raging Bull

Tubol, who is my guide in the meat factory, assures me that "this is an advanced plant, compared with others where kosher slaughter is done." Above us as we walk, blood drips from the slaughtered steers, staining our plastic overcoats. The floor is slippery with viscous fluids in various stages of clotting. As we returned to the ground floor, one of the steers managed to slip out of the chain around his leg as the door was raised, got to his feet and began to rampage around the room. Everyone ran for his life; the slaughterers, horrified, locked themselves in their cell. Only two brave workers tried to subdue the raging animal. Fortunately for them, he slipped on the bloody floor and fell to the ground. Immediately he was forced back into the Box and tied to the chain again. "That happens a few times a day," said a nervous Tubol, who had run with me to get safely behind the iron bars. Workers are often injured when a steer breaks loose, he said.

....

At the end of three hours of work the crew had slaughtered 300 head of cattle, of which 34 were disqualified due to adhesions of the lung; ... A trefa rate of only 15 percent is very satisfactory for the importer, and Hershkovitz and his crew claim that that is their average disqualification ratio.

....

At 8:45 A.M., as the shift ends, the crewmen go back to their room, examine the knives once again, and place them a long tube, which they close tightly. They then wash the bloodstains from their hands and face, wash their upper bodies and get ready for the shaharit (morning) prayer. ....

....

Three times the size of Israel, Uruguay has half the population, about three million. ... Cattle raising is a major export industry. About half a million head of cattle are slaughtered every year in dozens of meat plants, nine of which also work for Israeli importers. Most of them employ teams of the Chief Rabbinate, though three have teams that are authorized to provide kosher meat for Haredi groups: one for Rabbi Shach's Lithuanian community; a second for the "Eda Haredit" (known as "Badatz" koshering); and the third, sent by "Atara-Beit Yosef," the kashiut organization set up by the Shas (Sephardi Torah Guardians) party five years ago and headed by Rabbi Avraham Yosef, the son of Shas's spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.

The Atara crew operates in a meat processing factory located in Las Piedras, about an hour's drive from Montevideo. There I met with Moshe Dahan, a Haredi from Ashdod, who was the deputy chief. But things were more secretive here. Dahan refused to take me inside without the say-so of the crew chief, Avraham Suderi, who was just then supervising the slaughter process. Afterward Suderi told Dahan to get that journalist off the premises immediately.

....

Until about eight years ago, the Eda Haredit refused to recognize the meat that was brought from abroad with only the kosher certificate of the Chief RAbbinate. The result was that this ...Orthodox Jerusalem-based community was forced to buy fresh meat slaughtered locally in Israel by Haredim .... To meet the demands of Haredi consumers - and supply them with frozen meat at far lower prices - the heads of the Haredi koshering group negotiated agreements with a number of meat importers.

.... The Haredi public consumes only meat that is defined as "smooth" (when the animals' lung has no adhesions or secretions). Haredim are also more meticulous about exam the slaughter-knife for possible flaws. A Haredi crew has between 12 and 14 members, as opposed to 10 or 11 on Chief Rabbinate crews.

Still, the personnel tend to be a mixed bag: even the crews of the Haredi communities go abroad only after getting the approval of the Chief Rabbinate, and 90 percent of their members are registered with the Chief Rabbinate and have worked with that institution at some point. "There is no difference between the slaughter carried out by a Rabbinate crew and that of a Haredi crew," ....

....

What's more, Haredi kashrut groups usually work simultaneously in the service of the Chief Rabbinate. When they find a lung without adhesions, they label the meat "smooth" and earmark it for Haredis. Animals having lungs with a few adhesions, or with secretions but definitely without a puncture, are given a Chief Rabbinate kosher label and also imported to Israel. The result is that Haredi groups approve 30 to 35 percent of the animals they slaughter as "Kosher for the Chief Rabbinate."

The crews of the Chief Rabbinate find a similar ratio of "smooth" meat, but they are authorized to grant only a regular kosher seal, not the mehadrin type, even though half a year eariler, or a month down the line, these same people could be part of a Haredi crew. ....

....

Israelis consume about 80,000 tons of meat a year, and 50,000 tons of it is imported from South America, Europe, and China. Only about 10 percent of that quantity is defined as "smooth" meat and labeled mehadrin. ....

....

It is commonly thought that most of the kosher meat imported into Israel originates in Argentina, but in fact the land of the pampas is only in fourth place. First is Uruguay (with nine meat factories for kosher slaughter) followed by Ireland (six) and Brazil (four). Other countries to which Israeli slaughter crews are sent are Paraguay and China (two plants each), and Holland (one plant).

Meat is slaughtered and koshered for Israel in two plants in Argentina. One of them operates all year round in the service of the "Neve-Tzion" kosher label, given by Rabbi Shlomo Mahfud, from Bnei Brak. Many Haredim, particularly those of Yemenite extraction, consider meat with his label to be "ultra-medadrin." The permanent crew chief is Avraham Anatbi, a resident of Argentina, whose brother, Daniel Anatbi, the directory of the Rabbinate Department in the Religious Affairs Ministry, was the bureau chief of Rabbit Ovadia Yosef when he served as Sephardi chief rabbi. Most of the crew members are Argentineans; there are only four Israelis, who reside in an apartment in the Paso neighborhood of Buenos Aires. ....

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A few weeks ago, Rabbi Mahfud himself arrived in Argentina with two more slaughterers from Israel in order to, as it were, beef up the crew and increase the rate of slaughter from 400 to 600 head of cattle a day to meet the demand for the Jewish holidays. ....

Meat with a Malifud kosher label is much in demand....

The slaughter in the meat-processing factory of Avraham Anatbi in Buenos Aires is done in complete secrecy. When I asked to meet with Anatbi, I was told to wait outside the factory. The crew members, whose workday began at 6 A.M., emerged at 10:15A.M., having slaughtered 400 head of cattle in four hours. Anatbi was not among them. "Meat factories with Haredi kosher labels operate like the Dimona reactor," I was told by a veteran slaughterer of the Chief Rabbinate, who has also worked for Haredi crews. ....

....

For the past six months, Rabbi Bakshi-Doron has been in charge of ritual slaughter and kashrut for the Chief Rabbinate. In the five preceding years Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yisrael Lau held the position, but half a year ago they rotated their responsibilities (as they had agreed to do before being elected), with Lau in charge of the Rabbinical High Court for the next five years. ....

....

.... The directives of the Chief Rabbinate forbid the slaughter of more than 300 head of cattle in a day if there are only three slaughterers, but the crew chief ignores this and gives in to the pressure of the importer, who wants a higher output. ....

....

Kashrut problems also crop up in Israeli ports of entry. The Customs Authority does not allow a representative of the Rabbinate to be present when the meat is unloaded from the ships. In some cases, problems are discovered only at the exit gate of the port. Because of loading errors, cases have occurred in which cartons of non-kosher meat, bound for other countries, arrived in Israel. The mistakes were discovered only when the quantity of meat that arrived in the Israeli port was matched against the stated quantity that was supposed to have been shipped, and even then only when the story was leaked to the Chief Rabbinate. In other instances, the Rabbinate confirms, non-kosher meat was brought into Israel.

There are such cases. And we discover it when the merchandise arrives at the meat-processing plant in Israel," says director-general Shreiber. The problem perturbs Rabbi Glucksherg: "I am afraid that we do not get hold of the cartons of trefa meat that enter the country, and then the unclean meat gets to people who eat only kosher meat."

A few months ago a shipment of dozens of tons of meat from South America was discovered to be ritually unclean, due to traces of abdominal fat (helev) and sinew that were discovered in the animal's rear section. The entire shipment was therefore sold to Arabs. "It happens sometimes," Rabbi Glucksberg concedes.

Koshering the rear part of an animal requires the addition of a specialist to the crew. Many importers prefer to save the time (the act of nikur, as it is called, slows down the pace of kosher slaughter) and the expense involved. By agreement with the meat-processing plants abroad, only the animals' forward parts and innards are sent to Israel, with the plants left to market the rear sections as they wish. Only if there is a demand for rear sections are importers forced to send the specialist.

Another problem that vexes the Rabbinate is how well the meat is frozen en route to Israel. Meat that has not undergone the full koshering process before being shipped has to be maintained at a temperature that does not rise above minus 16 degrees Centigrade. The Rabbinate has no way to check the level of freezing during the transport of the meat to the ship, while it is being loaded or in the ocean crossing. "We have a problem," Rabbi Raful admits. "The level of freezing is examined only in the plant and when the meat arrives in Israel. What happened along the way is difficult for us to know."

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