Q&A: Unofficial Kashrut
Unofficial Kashrut
Question
Hello Rabbi,
Today the court allowed businesses to advertise that they follow kashrut standards, even if they do not have official kashrut certification from the Chief Rabbinate.
I would like to hear your opinion:
Is this proper from a values standpoint, or does it amount to enabling deception of the public, when there is no supervision of the declaration and no one standing behind it?
Will this cause people who keep kosher to stumble, since until now they ate only with official kashrut certification, and now they may end up eating non-kosher food?
How should the religious public respond to this ruling, from a religious and moral standpoint?
Answer
Hello,
I hadn’t heard about this, but this is the dish cooked up by the Chief Rabbinate. It would have been proper to have a regulator who checks the reliability of kashrut, but since the Rabbinate operates the way it does, there is no relevant regulator, and this is the result.
The question of whether this is proper from a values standpoint is not clear to me. Did the High Court of Justice do something proper? The High Court is not concerned with whether people eat kosher, but with preserving rights and the law.
The religious public should be very happy about this ruling and recite the blessing of “Who has kept us alive” and for having rid us of the Chief Rabbinate.
And the laws—this requires further examination. And in the notes of Rabbi Y. G. T. Z. M. and it seems that it is a slip of the pen or a typo; they wrote “and a woman” and this requires close analysis: