As Forward readers know, I have, on several occasions, criticized ultra-Orthodox/fundamentalist Jewish leaders for abuses of power, toleration of bigotry, failures to protect or educate their own communities, and selective manipulation of secular law to arrogate power to themselves and squelch the rights of others. So, when a photo circulated this week of a Hasidic…
Come Yom Kippur, the chickens of Crown Heights and Boro Park may still have their heads — if an activist group gets its way. A new lawsuit filed by a group of agitated Brooklyn residents against four rabbis, several Hasidic congregations and New York City takes aim at Kapparot, the Jewish ritual where chickens are…
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 —…
It’s not a great week to be a chicken or a goat. That is thanks to a fluke of the Islamic and Hebrew calendars that has set the prescribed time for a Jewish ritual slaughter and a Muslim sacrifice within a single day of each other. This year, the Jewish ritual of Kapparot is performed…
California regulators ordered two Orthodox Jewish groups in Los Angeles to stop performing the Yom Kippur ritual kapparot. The state’s Department of Food and Agriculture on Friday shut down kapparot at the Ohel Moshe synagogue and the Beit Aaron outreach organization. They were accused of operating unlicensed slaughterhouses, according to reports. Animal rights activists had…
Thousands of chickens designated for the pre-Yom Kippur kapparot ritual died in New York due to unseasonable heat. An estimated 2,000 chickens died Wednesday in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Borough Park on Wednesday, when temperatures climbed into the mid-90s, the New York Daily News reported. Chaim Singer,32, told the newspaper that water and shade were…
Thousands of Orthodox Jews are preparing to swing live chickens over their heads before Yom Kippur, symbolically transferring their sins to the chicken. The chicken is then slaughtered and donated to the poor for consumption. This practice is called ‘Kapparot,’ which literally means “atonement.” Using fish, money or chickens are acceptable methods of performing this…
Israel’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi, David Lau, called for better treatment of the chickens used in the pre-Yom Kippur kapparot ritual. Lau in a letter addressed to ritual organizers and participants wrote that causing the chickens to suffer before and during kapparot would be a “mitzvah through a transgression,” which he said “was not the intention…
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