Los Angeles Market in Kosher Meat Scandal Gets New Ownership
Local businessman Shlomo Rechnitz has bought a scandal-plagued kosher supermarket in Los Angeles from its former owner, who is suspected of mislabeling its meat.
The Rabbinical Council of California, a kashrut certifier, on Wednesday announced the troubled Doheny Market will undergo a serious makeover after Rechnitz purchased the store from Mike Engleman at its behest.
“The store will reopen in the coming days under RCC supervision, after undergoing a thorough restocking and will feature mehadrin kashrus standards,” the RCC said in a statement. “The previous owner has no financial or operational interest in the store.” Mehadrin is an especially stringent kosher ceritification,
Scandal erupted on March 24, the day before the first night of Passover, when evidence gathered by a detective showed Engleman smuggling meat from an unknown source into Dohney Market while the rabbinic supervisor was away.
The Rabbinical Council of California immediately revoked the kosher certification of the popular meat store but worry spread over the Jewish legal status of products sold to unsuspecting customers, casting a pall over the Passover plans of hundreds of families in the area.
Rabbi Yisroel Belsky, a well-respected religious arbiter, ruled all meat sold prior to March 24 was considered kosher, even if a minority of it was not.
The Rabbinical Council of California said it asked Rechnitz, who is Belsky’s son-in-law, to buy the store to ensure the observant community in central Los Angeles had a reliable source of kosher food.
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