VIDEO: Taking Kapparot Way Too Far
By Josh Nathan-Kazis October 3, 2014
Worried that your day-old infant won’t be forgiven on Yom Kippur? Maybe you should wave a chicken over his head.
That’s the route one ultra-Orthodox woman has taken in a video circulating widely on WhatsApp and posted to the internet today by Yeshiva World News.
It’s unclear where or when the video was recorded — one source says Kiryas Joel in upstate New York, another claims Israel.
The video depicts and ultra-Orthodox woman clutching a chicken in a hospital ward for newborn babies and performing the Kapparot ritual over a presumably male infant.
Kapparot usually entails Jewish men circling a chicken over their heads on the eve of Yom Kippur and then having the chicken slaughtered, in a symbolic transfer of God’s judgment.
Performing the ritual over a newborn appears to be highly unusual.
“To think for a moment that me taking a chicken and waving that chicken, that I’m going to receive atonement, it’s foolish,” Rabbi Shea Hecht told the Forward earlier this week. Rather, he said, “It’s meant to give me the mindset that when I enter the synagogue [at the start of Yom Kippur], that I recognize that life is a gift.”
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
