A New Passover Tradition: Desalinated Water
His status in haredi circles is legendary, and for years his kashrut seal has appeared on every kind grocery item. Now, you can get tap water with the seal of Moshe Yehuda Leib Landau, the chief rabbi of Bnei Brak.
Though during the year a tiny amount of something non-kosher doesn’t render otherwise kosher food off-limits, on Passover, a principle of assur b’mashehu applies. This means that, strictly speaking, even a small spec of bread renders a huge pot of Passover food hametz.
The question that has bothered some Israeli Orthodox rabbis for years is: Given that much of Israel’s water supply comes from the Sea of Galilee, if a picnicker dropped a sandwich in the lake, wouldn’t that make all of Israel’s drinking water hametz?
To be on the safe side, some Orthodox families fill up huge tanks with water before Passover (the strict rules don’t apply to water that you owned before the festival). This year, the Bnei Brak municipality arranged with Mekorot, the company that pipes Israel’s water, to only receive desalinated sea-water.
And just to make sure that the desalination operation is hametz-free, Landau went to visit ahead of the festival. His aides said they were impressed that the water is pumped from the depths of the Mediterranean — presumably thought to be a hametz-free area. If anyone is reading this from a cruise ship on the Med and recalls dropping a sandwich overboard, please wait until after Passover to post a comment.
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
