Food

Dutch Debate Over Kosher Slaughter Ends

By JTA June 19, 2012

The Dutch Senate formally scrapped legislation to ban ritual slaughter in the Netherlands.

Fifty-one of the 75 senators voted Tuesday not to ratify the law passed last year by the parliament.

The vote is the final word in a protracted public debate about animal welfare, religious freedom and integration that began in September 2008, when tiny Holland’s Party for Animals submitted a bill to ban the slaughter of conscious animals. Islamic and Jewish law require that animals be conscious at the time of the slaughter.

Last week, the Dutch Senate ratified a deal to adapt ritual slaughter to the state’s animal welfare norms.

The Jewish and Muslim communities signed the deal with the minister of agriculture. Under the deal, animals may remain conscious for up to 40 seconds after their throats are cut. Animals that stay conscious after that are stunned, rendering them non-kosher and non-halal.

Amsterdam’s chief rabbi, Aryeh Ralbag, and two rabbinical judges said they were unhappy about the deal because it constituted government interference. However, they agreed the process was kosher.

“We were able to reach this tremendous victory in the Senate thanks to the covenant,” Binyomin Jacobs, a Dutch chief rabbi and prominent member of the Rabbinical Centre of Europe, told JTA.

The deputy director of RCE, a Brussels-based organization connected to the Chabad movement, said he hoped the deal would serve as a precedent to defend shechitah, Jewish ritual slaughter, elsewhere in Europe. “This is an ongoing effort,” Rabbi Aryeh Goldberg said.

Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis, said that “We hope that this vote will also send a message of religious tolerance and freedom to other countries in Europe which contemplate legislation which further restricts freedom of religion.

Goldschmidt said his organization, a rabbinical alliance established in 1956, hoped that Switzerland, Norway and the Baltic states would “eventually repeal” their anti-shechitah laws.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO