CSENGELE, Hungary (AP) – In a small room full of religious texts, a Jewish rabbi demonstrates how to sharpen and inspect knives before using them to cut the throats of chickens, geese and other poultry in a slaughterhouse kosher in Hungary.
A shochet, someone trained and certified to slaughter animals according to Jewish tradition, opens a knife on increasingly fine stones before drawing the blade through a nail to detect any imperfections in the steel that may inhibit a clean cut and clean and cause unnecessary pain.
“One of the most important things about kosher is that the animal doesn’t suffer,” said Rabbi Jacob Werchow, who oversees production at Quality Poultry, a 3-and-a-half-year-old slaughterhouse that supplies nearly 40 percent of the poultry. kosher European market and much of the foie gras sold in Israel.
The methods used in the settlement of the village of Csengele are based on ancient Jewish principles that govern the human treatment of living creatures. They are also at the center of a debate on how to balance animal rights and religious rights, as parts of Europe are effectively limiting or banning the ritual sacrifice practices of Jews and Muslims.
Companies like Quality Poultry have found new export markets since last month the EU’s highest court upheld a law in the Flanders region in Belgium that banned the slaughter of animals without first knocking them unconscious. But the ruling by the European Court of Justice has also raised fears about possible bans on ritual slaughter across the EU and has sparked memories of times when European Jews faced cruel persecution.
“This decision not only affects the Belgian Jewish community, but it affects everyone,” said Rabbi Slomo Koves of the Association of Jewish Communities of Hungary, owner of the Csengele slaughterhouse. “If this is the case in Belgium and the court has given it moral approval, this could start a process on a larger scale. If this logic is lowered, the next step is that you can’t sell meat like this either. countries “.
The EU has been demanding the pre-stunning of animals since 1979, but allows member states to make exceptions based on religion. Most do, but together with Flanders and the Walloon region, Belgium, Slovenia, Denmark and Sweden, as well as Switzerland, Iceland and Norway, which do not belong to the EU, they have removed religious exemptions, which means that kosher and halal meat.
Animal advocacy groups claim that cutting the throats of livestock and poultry while they are conscious causes suffering that leads to animal cruelty. Surprising methods vary, but the procedure is most often performed using electric shocks or a screw gun on the animal’s skull.
“Reversible stunning is the bare minimum needed to protect animals,” said Reineke Hameleers, managing director of the Brussels-based Eurogroup for Animals. “They must be unconscious before they are killed.”
The situation is not so dry for religious observers. Jewish law prohibits injury or damage to animal tissues prior to slaughter, and modern stunning practices can cause death or irreparable injuries that will make meat and birds non-kosher, according to Koves.
While some Muslim religious authorities consider pre-sacrifice blackout permissible, local Muslim groups argued that the impressive requirements of Flanders and Wallonia arose from the efforts of the Belgian Islamophobic far right to harass their communities.
Rabbis Koves and Werchow said they believe the kosher slaughter method, known as shechita, is no less humane than the methods used in conventional meat production. In addition to the intense process of sharpening and inspecting knives, the shochet is trained to make the cut with a single gentle motion, cutting the animal’s nerves and draining blood from the brain in a matter of seconds.
“Everything you think about … if kosher slaughter is better for the animal than regular slaughter, you’re basically putting animal rights ahead of human rights,” Koves said. “If people ban our rights to have kosher food, that means it limits our human rights. And that, especially in a place like Europe, brings back very bad memories.”
Laws that required stunning animals before slaughter appeared in some European countries as early as the late 19th century. Adolf Hitler ordered the practice in 1933 just after he became chancellor of Germany, one of the first laws imposed by the Nazis.
Jewish and Muslim groups challenged Flanders law in the Constitutional Court of Belgium, which referred it to the European Court of Justice to rule on its compatibility with EU law.
The Advocate General of the Court of Justice advised the court to annul the law of Flanders, arguing that it violated the rights of certain denominations to preserve their essential religious rites. But the court disagreed, finding that the law “allowed a fair balance to be struck between the importance of animal welfare and the freedom of Jewish and Muslim believers to manifest their religion.”
The animal welfare minister from the Brussels region in Belgium, where stunning is not mandatory, said the ruling would give life to the debate over mandatory stunning. The Brussels chapter of the New Flemish Alliance, a center-right party whose members led the push for the law in Flanders, said it would now table a proposed ordinance to ban stunning without killing the capital region.
The Hungarian government helped fund the Csengele slaughterhouse and Prime Minister Viktor Orban joined Jewish groups in condemning the court’s decision as an assault on religious freedom. In a January letter to the U.S.-based Jewish Agency for Israel, Orban wrote that his government “would spare no effort to raise our voice against the decision in all possible international forums.”
Koves and other top rabbis in Europe are studying ways to appeal the EU court’s decision.