European Jews Fight Polish Kosher Slaughter Ban
Major European Jewish organizations have started to fight the ban on kosher slaughter in Poland, after the country’s parliament decided last week to leave intact the prohibition on killing animals for meat without first stunning them, which affects both Jewish and Muslim religious slaughter.
The European Jewish Congress, the Polish Jewish community and the Conference of European Rabbis are lobbying the Polish government and selected MPs of EU member states in an effort to reverse the decision, or at least make exceptions for religious purposes. Representatives of these organizations are scheduled to meet tomorrow in Brussels to discuss the course of the struggle.
At the same time, the European Jewish Association has launched a pan-European campaign against the decision. EJA director Rabbi Menachem Margolin has held a series of meetings with the Polish representatives in the European Parliament and with senior Polish government officials, urging them to join the fight against the decision.
Following these talks, Margolin noted that he got a positive response from many of the EU Parliament members with whom he spoke, adding that some said the Polish Parliament’s decision contravened the Polish constitution.
“Kosher slaughter has been proven scientifically to be a method that is not any crueler than other slaughter methods, as it is sometimes portrayed by anti-Semitic organizations throughout world, and it is essential to maintaining a Jewish lifestyle,” he wrote to a Polish lawmaker.
For more go to Haaretz
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