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.”
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
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 the protests on college campuses.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
