Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Make a matched gift and support Jewish journalism. DONATE NOW
Fast Forward

Jewish Animal Welfare Group Pushes Synagogues To ‘Go Vegan’

A Jewish animal welfare group is providing grants for U.S. synagogues to “go vegan” for one year. The Shamayim V’Aretz Institute will donate $5,000 to five synagogues to help offset the costs of only providing food on Shabbat and holidays that contain no animal products whatsoever.

“Veganism is one of the fastest-growing trends in America aimed at improving human health, supporting the environment and reducing animal suffering,” Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz, the founder and CEO of the Shamayim V’Aretz Institute, told PlantBasedNews.org. “The Jewish community needs to show leadership, but there is not one vegan synagogue in America yet.”

The Shamayim V’Aretz Institute, founded in 2012 to put “animal welfare on the Jewish agenda,” counts Mayim Bialik, a star of the sitcom “The Big Bang Theory,” as one of its founding members.

Contact Ari Feldman at [email protected] or on Twitter @aefeldman.

It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!

This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions. 

We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.

As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday! 

Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.