B’nai Brith Youth Organization will abstain from Agriprocessors meat this summer. Here’s their statement:

Camp Food is No Joking Matter
BBYO Teens Demand Agriprocessor-Free Camp Programs

As a result of the allegations of intolerable injustices at Agriprocessors, the largest producer of kosher meat and poultry in the U.S., BBYO takes major stand by asking its various camp partners to avoid serving Agriprocessor products, to which they comply.

Nine hundred teens participating in BBYO’s summer leadership experiences at Perlman Camp, PA; Beber Camp, WI; and American Hebrew Academy, CA, over the course of this summer, will eat meals free of Agriprocessor products, showing a unified commitment to social justice and Jewish values.

Teens make concerted effort to expand summer program curricula to address the Agriprocessor issue from variety of angles, including the ritual and ethical implications of kashrut, worker’s rights, immigration reform and Jewish values.

The first program will take place on Thursday, June 26, 11:45 am – 1:15 pm, when nearly 100 Jewish teens will gather at Beber Camp in Mukwonago, Wisconson (suburban Milwaukee) to make their voices heard against the intolerable injustices at Agriprocessors. Confirmed speakers include Rabbi Morris Allen, a Minneapolis-based leader of the Heksher Tzedek campaign for kosher foods to be produced ethically, who has been to Postville multiple times and will share first-hand accounts from factory workers. Lauren Shenfeld, BBYO’s International Teen Co-President, will also address the group, to raise awareness among her peers and encourage action when teens return home to their local communities.

“If anyone is going to make their opinion on this problem matter to the Jewish community and communities at large, and ultimately stand up against an issue in which human rights and Jewish values are demeaned, it’s BBYO teens.” – Lauren Shenfeld, BBYO International Teen Co-President

“The reason this issue has struck such a deep chord with BBYO teens is because it’s the story of their grandparents and great grandparents – the story of immigrating to find a better life, fighting oppression and standing up for social justice.” – Marilyn Sneiderman, BBYO Deputy Director and former Director of Field Mobilization for the National AFL-CIO

In an op-ed yesterday in the Jerusalem Post, Rabbi Avi Shafran offers the first public statement on the Agriprocessors situation from Agudath Israel of America, the haredi umbrella group whose constituents are probably the company’s most reliable consumers.

Shafran writes:

Neither I nor Agudath Israel of America has any connection to Agriprocessors. And for all we know, it may yet be shown that the firm indeed knowingly hired illegal aliens. Or that it mistreated them, or that it was a front for a drug operation, a neo-Nazi group or a baby-cannibalizing cult. All under the eyes of the federal inspectors present at the plant at all times.

But unless and until some wrongdoing is actually proven, not merely suspected or charged, no human being - certainly no Jew, bound as we are by the Torah’s clear admonition in such matters - has any right to assume guilt, much less voice condemnation or seek to levy punishment.

It’s a fair point.

It was announced last week that Agriprocessors is to hold an “urgent public meeting” on Tuesday in New York City. The meeting will be held at 4:45 at Bnai Zion on East 39th Street and will feature presentations by Orthodox superlawyer Nat Lewin, company spokesperson Menachem Lubinsky, and Rabbi Menachem Weissmandel, the Postville plant’s chief kosher supervisor. Also on the bill are unnamed Postville community activists and kosher industry leaders. According to the invitation, the event will be a chance to “learn the TRUTH about Agriprocessors” (emphasis in the original) and to learn “what can be done to stop the slander and vilifications against Agriprocessors.” Those wishing to attend are instructed to RSVP to Lubinsky’s firm, Lubicom. 

But here’s the catch — late Friday we learned from Lubinsky that press will not be admitted. When asked, he declined to tell us why. The truth will apparently only be shared with invited guests. 

The Tuesday meeting comes, as the Forward noted last week, as the company appears to be gearing up for a big public relations push. They have retained the services of PR powerhouse 5WPR (after being turned down as a client by another prominent firm), and they have lately been uncharacteristically quick in responding to the media. Lubinsky e-mailed me a statement last week responding to allegations related to the company’s decision to hire homeless workers from Texas — before I even asked him for one. 

But the company and kosher supervision agencies also seem intent on closely controlling the message that they are putting out to the Jewish community. Last week, we blogged about Rabbi Seth Mandel, the OU’s head of kosher supervision. Mandel met in Hartford recently with a group of rabbis and insisted that the contents of the meeting remain private. He later sent a lengthy e-mail explaining his view of the situation, and when we asked him about it, he said the e-mail was private and should not be reported (you can read the e-mail here).

Who was it who said the truth will you set you free? Oh, right.  

Following up on my earlier post about Seth Mandel, the OU’s head of meat supervision, we obtained a May 26 e-mail in which Rabbi Mandel lays out in more detail his view of the Agriprocessors situation.

The e-mail is quite long, but a few items caught our attention.

The first is Mandel’s assertion that Agri doesn’t “cut corners” with kashrut, but it does push those corners as far as it can. Same is true with other facets of its business. But in both cases, Mandel says, that’s par for the course. “Agri,” he writes, “is no worse than other large meat packers.”

Mandel also wonders whether consumers would be willing to bear the costs of doing more than is minimally required by the law, and has some bracing words on immigration policy. But the real (sorry) meat of the e-mail is where Mandel discusses whether or not the allegations — of drug production, worker mistreatment, underage workers, etc. — are in fact true. He openly admits that he doesn’t know, but what he does know is that if such things were going on, the kosher workers wouldn’t know about it. They don’t associate much with the general workforce, he writes, and they don’t go into “isolated warehouses,” which he says are “the only possible places” that drugs could have been produced. In the meat production areas, Mandel gives the company a clean bill of health: “There are no beatings or sexual mistreatment of workers or drug facilities in the operating areas of the plant. There are also no workers that look underage.”

That last point is perhaps subjective, while offering Mandel some wiggle room (”The workers didn’t look underage”). I interviewed two teenagers in Postville who both claimed to work in production and both looked pretty young to me. I reported on it here.

Here’s the e-mail (Rabbi Mandel says we don’t have the full version, and the one that we have is misleading. He declined to be more specific or supply a complete version of the e-mail): (more…)

As always, couple items to note ….

• The Uri L’tzedek boycott of Agriprocessors has gone into effect. The self-described Orthodox social justice group (which doesn’t like the word boycott) said it would refrain from purchasing Agriprocessors’ products on June 15 if the company didn’t agree to establish a transparent mechanism to ensure compliance with Jewish and U.S. labor law. A meeting took place last week, but the group is still waiting for assurances that the company has turned a corner. There’s more on this here.
• Meanwhile, another Jewish group is jumping into the fray. In keeping with its historic roots, Ameinu, the American wing of the World Labor Zionist movement, has issued a statement urging Jewish groups not to patronize Agri. We’ve also heard that another summer camp, the Conservative Ramah Darom in Georgia, turned away a shipment from Agri. Our gut here is that this is likely to further convince the company’s defenders that Jewish outrage over this issue is simply an opportunistic pile-on for liberal groups.
• Meanwhile, some of the most damning evidence of an impending shortage emerged last week when we discovered that FreshDirect, the popular Internet retailer that gets all its kosher meat from Agri, has some 40 kosher meat products listed as currently unavailable. No worries if you’re planning to serve glatt kosher beef neck bones this Shabbos, the supply of which seems to be holding. (NOTE: If you follow that link, you need to type in a NYC zip code to see the page. If you’re outside the city, use mine: 11215). However, there does seem to be enough meat for the company to have donated 1,000 pounds to flood relief in Iowa, a Chabad website reported.
• Finally, an email was circulated this week by a Lubavitch rabbi in Connecticut describing a recent meeting local rabbis had with Rabbi Seth Mandel, the OU’s head of meat supervision. More on that, after the jump.

(more…)

Rabbi Shlomo Levin, spiritual leader of Milwaukee’s Modern Orthodox Lake Park Synagogue, has an opinion piece in J the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle. calling on the Orthodox establishment to start certifying the working conditions at kosher meat companies:

The Orthodox Union states clearly that its supervision relates only to whether food is permitted to be eaten. It does not consider labor issues, animal cruelty, environmental impact or anything else of this nature and has no plans to start doing so. Why not? For many reasons.

The list of potential issues to include in expanded supervision is nearly endless. The government already regulates some of these matters; the O.U. lacks the required resources and expertise.

And many of these concerns are not uniquely Jewish, while the O.U.’s purpose is to serve the special needs of the Jewish community.

There is nothing wrong with the O.U. conducting itself in this manner, as long as we understand what the O.U. symbol means. A product is kosher to eat, but whether the company manufacturing that product is kosher to do business with is unknown.

What we need is not a replacement for the current kosher supervision system, but an addition to it.

Since how a business treats its workers, the environment and its animals is important, we need another mechanism by which consumers can receive that information.

The Conservative movement has taken some steps to form a “hechsher tzedek” kosher certification focused on the above issues. Some other small, independent groups have done the same.

The Orthodox kashrut establishment, however, due to its large existing infrastructure of supervisors, would be able to produce a new certification with the greatest ease, efficiency and speed.

As kosher consumers, let’s make clear that we want them to do so. Only if we as consumers make known that we will base our purchasing decisions on the presence or absence of such a new symbol is it likely that substantial action will be taken.

We’re a little overdue for an Agriprocessors update, and as always, there’s some choice nuggets to report.

• Bruce Braley, the Iowa Democrat whose district includes part of Postville, made a pointed statement on the Agriprocessors situation, saying the company shouldn’t get any more second chances. Braley was responding to an inquiry concerning Iowa’s decision to reduce by three-fourths the $182,000 fine levied against the company for safety violations. The Iowa Workforce Development’s labor division said leniency was warranted because the company plans to improve. “You have to keep pressuring [Agriprocessors] to engage in the right behavior,” Braley said.
• Folks in Postville have told me that more subpoenas have been issued at the Agriprocessors plant, though details are sketchy about who is being summoned. This news follows a report late last month that a close associate of the Rubashkins had been summoned to appear before a grand jury. All this is sure to fuel even more speculation that the government is planning to bring company officials (or former officials, as the case may be) up on criminal charges. The U.S. Attorney’s Office refused to comment.
• The Associated Press ran a story this week on continuing fears of price hikes for kosher meat. I’m proud to say we were ahead on this, but the AP did add an interesting wrinkle: Even if Agri can get itself back up to speed, it will almost certainly have to pay documented workers more than the undocumented, or falsely documented, ones it had previously employed, which would likely undermine the company’s major competitive advantage: cost.
• Eight kosher summer camps in the midwest have found a non-Agri supplier of kosher meat after the company filled an order for meat with a shipment that was two years past its date.
• Leah Koenig has an interesting interview with a former Agri kosher supervisor on her food blog, The Jew & the Carrot. His take: “It seems very typical considering that the way they managed the company is kind of unprofessional …I don’t think [the Rubashkins are] monsters or deliberately trying to hurt anyone. It’s their lack of professionalism.”
• In a sign of how hopelessly far apart the ultra-Orthodox are from the rest of the Jewish community on this, a religious blog published this frontal assault on Conservative and Reform Jews, accusing their leaders of cynically exploiting the Agri situation under the guise of genuinely caring about kashrut.
• And finally, the folks who claim responsibility for getting the Agri ball rolling sent us this heartwarming story this week: A PETA investigator sent thousands of dollars worth of vegetarian food to the Postville church that has been helping families affected by the raid. PETA, by the way, might not have a taste for meat, but they certainly do for irony.

Rabbi Morris Allen, project director of the Conservative movement’s hekhsher tzedek initiative, made a quiet visit to Postville two weeks ago to talk to some of the workers he’d met on his previous visits in 2007 and ’06.

He went with his 19-year-old daughter, not as a representative of his movement, but just to show those arrested in the May 12 immigration raid that a rabbi cares about them.

So far, 300 workers have been convicted, he says. Some are wearing electronic ankle bracelets, to make sure they don’t report to work or flee. Allen visited one woman who said she couldn’t pay her $750 June 1 rent because she was now out of work. As she was talking, Allen saw her ankle bracelet plugged into the wall for recharging. “How much more indignity can be imposed on these people?” he asks.

Allen spoke to a 16-year-old boy from Guatemala who has been working at the plant for a year. The boy doesn’t go to school. “The sad thing is, if he’s deported, he will probably have reached the highest salary level he’ll ever have in his lifetime,” Allen says.

A local church, St. Bridget’s, is trying to help out by distributing money and food to those most severely affected. “Sister Mary is running as much of a social service agency as possible, taking care of several hundred people,” he reports. “It’s unbelievable to see these people walking around with GPS monitors on their legs.”

Allen’s synagogue, Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights, MN, is collecting money to send to the church, to help relief efforts.

But there are two sides to every issue, he adds. Downtown there’s a new community center that the Rubashkins help build. And a local minister told him none of his parishioners wants AgriProcessors to close. They depend on it for their livelihood. “He said, we certainly want to see the workers treated differently, but the success of the plant is beneficial for all of us in Postville,” Allen reports.

As Allen was leaving, he saw some Chassidic boys playing baseball, their tzitzit flying. He thought about the Guatemalan boy their same age living a few blocks away, who has spent the last year working in the slaughterhouse. “Two different versions of the American dream,” he muses.

Just got this announcement from Agriprocessors’ spokesperson:

As part of the ongoing effort to enhance compliance with immigration and employment law, Agriprocessors has retained Jim Martin and his compliance specialty group, The Prevene Group, as the company’s outside Corporate Compliance Officer. Martin, a former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, will begin his efforts immediately.

“My job is to ensure the company operates in compliance with all applicable laws,” Martin said. “Agriprocessors’ 800 jobs are important to Postville and northern Iowa, along with the observant Jewish community across the country that relies on them for their kosher meat and poultry. Agriprocessors can meet the needs of those who depend on the company and operate in compliance with all laws, and I intend to see that happen.”

After spending more than 20 years with the United States Attorney’s Office, Mr. Martin has spent the past several years helping companies strengthen and enhance their compliance programs. He was recently recognized in Best Lawyers in America for corporate governance and compliance law.

(more…)

That’s what many Jewish Shabbos tables will be serving this week if the reports we’re hearing about the kosher meat supply turn out to be true. But first …

Late yesterday we heard that a bunch of Jewish bigs had signed on to the Uri L’tzedek petition, which vows a boycott June 15 if Agriprocessors doesn’t commit to establishing an externally transparent department to ensure compliance with American and Jewish legal requirements concerning treatment of workers. A spokesman for UL confirmed they are in discussions with the company.

We also got a statement today, issued through the company’s PR guy, announcing that Agriprocessors would be hiring a chief compliance officer. I emailed back asking for more details about the search for a new CEO, which were supposed to be announced last week. I got this reply:

Agriprocessors has begun the process of changing the current management team and adding a Chief Executive Officer by identifying potential candidates with backgrounds necessary for this new position. We will continue to move quickly and deliberately to make this important addition to the company. In the meantime, we are moving rapidly to increase our production capacity each day so we can continue to provide our customers with the quality products they expect from Agriprocessors.

Speaking of production capacity, contrary to assurances we are getting from company spokespeople, the supply of kosher meat is beginning to be affected. Several butchers told us they were able to find other meat suppliers after Agriprocessors was unable to fill orders. But at least one kosher caterer in Florida told JTA she was running from store to store trying to find supplies, and that if Rubashkin shuts down, it will destroy her business since there are no alternatives in her area. JTA’s Sue Fishkoff will have more on this later in the week.

And finally, a piece of news we neglected to note earlier. Agriprocessors has been placing ads for new workers in a Guatemalan newspaper – NOT newspapers for the Guatemalan community in the United States, but newspapers in Guatamela. There’s a PDF of the ad over at FailedMessiah.