FailedMessiah reports today that two comments attributed to Rabbi Morris Allen, the Minnesota rabbi behind the Conservative movement’s Hekhsher Tzedek project, originated in the office of 5WPR, the public relations firm hired to help kosher meat producer Agriprocessors cope with the fallout from the May 12 raid. We’re still seeking comment from 5W.

Shira Dicker, a publicist working with Allen, sends us this email:

Dear Reporters,

In a bizarre effort to discredit the efforts of Rabbi Morris Allen, the founder and spiritual force behind Hekhsher Tzedek — the new ethical certification of the Rabbinical Assembly and United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism — staffers from 5W Public Relations wrote phony comments in his name on the website www.failedmessiah.com.

Hekhsher Tzedek is pursuing legal action in this matter.

The Lower Hudson Journal News published a story on Baile Glauber, an Orthodox woman who recently graduated from the Rockland Police Academy.

A newly hired town police officer has been given Friday nights to Saturday evenings off to accommodate her religious beliefs.

The special work schedule afforded Officer Baile J. Glauber has raised concerns among other officers, said Officer Dennis Procter, the department’s Police Benevolent Association president.

“I hope the town is not going to give special treatment to one individual for religious observances and not give other officers the same opportunities,” Procter said. “We all can’t always make temple or church or spend weekends with our families.”

It’s tough to be an Orthodox woman cop. First the fellow officers don’t want you getting special religious treatment. Then the peanut gallery at a popular Orthodox Web site don’t think you’re one of them.

Here are a few of the comments at The Yeshiva World site:

• How can an orthodox let alone an ultra-orthodox woman carry a gun? which I assume a police officer must do? Isn’t it an issur d’oraysa? (the poskim have given only very specfic heterim).
• I would think there were tznius issues here as well. A police person sometimes has to get physical. This doesn’t sound like something a really frum woman should be doing.
• How will she arrest a man? ask her husband to hold him? or she’ll only arrst females?
• A female police officer, by definition, cannot be Orthodox Jewish. She may claim to be Orthodox, like I can claim to be the Pope, but Orthodox it doesn’t make her.
• Did she get an exemption from wearing pants too? Or does tzinius (and other halachas) not apply when inconvenient?

The blogger DovBear offered this response to Glauber’s Orthodox critics:

Everyone following the thread here? If you wish to be absent from work on shabbos, for the sake of keeping the seventh day holy, you still might not be frum enough to win any respect from this crowd.

The Orlando Sentinel takes a look at Aliyah Sepharad International, a “group for Hispanics of Jewish ancestry who wish to get back to their religious roots.” According to the newspaper, the ultimate goal of the group is to help these people immigrate to Israel.

Because they were forced to suppress their beliefs, many Hispanic descendants of Sephardic Jews grew up not knowing about their heritage.

This is rapidly changing.

“There is a phenomenon going on in the world right now with what we call ‘returning Jews,’ ” said Nathan Katz, professor of religious studies with Florida International University in Miami. “They make up a significant percentage of synagogues [in South Florida]. It is not just in Central Florida.”

Sascha Baron Cohen narrates “the running of the Jews” in Borat.

The serious-minded former director of Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Yossi Alpher, who also is co-editor of Bitterlemons.org, a Palestinian-Israeli Web site, writes about a close encounter of the Bruno kind in his latest column in the Forward.

Michelle Citrin and William Levin

Dina Kraft, JTA’s Israel Correspondent met up in Jerusalem with singer Michelle Citrin aka Rosh Hashana Girl and her creative partner and friend William Levin. They are the team who brought the world the two YouTube hits “Twenty Things to do with Matzah” and “I Gotta Love You Rosh Hashana” — part of their attempt to bring a touch of the young, hip, and artistic to being Jewish today.

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To subscribe to JTA’s Behind the News podcast, click here.

Israel has been engaged in heated debate in recent days about the efficacy of trading Arab prisoners with blood on their hands for the remains of two Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hezbollah in July 2006.

The Jerusalem Post’s Matthew Wagner weighs in with a piece on what the Jewish sages might have said about this swap.

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…)