Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Animal Rights Activists Sue Over Yom Kippur Chicken-Swinging Rite

An animal-rights group filed a lawsuit against the Irvine, California Police Department for not enforcing animal cruelty laws by halting a pre-Yom Kippur ritual.

The lawsuit filed this week is aimed at stopping Chabad of Irvine’s kapparot ceremony, a pre-Yom Kippur ritual in which a chicken is swung by its legs and then slaughtered.

It is the second attempt in recent years by the San Diego-based Animal Protection and Rescue League to halt the ceremony.

The lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court in Santa Ana nameAs both the Irvine police and the Los Angeles Police Department, saying that they protect the “illegal killing of animals” by not cracking down on the kapparot ceremonies, the Orange County Register reported.

A lawsuit filed by the group against Chabad in 2015 on the basis of animal cruelty said that the chickens are crammed tightly into cages and mishandled, and are disposed of and not used for food.

A federal judge in May dismissed a lawsuit filed on behalf of the Virginia-based United Poultry Concerns claiming that the practice violates the state’s unfair competition law.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join 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 credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link 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.