Poland to run out of kosher meat in a month
Poland's Jewish community has about a one-month supply of
kosher meat left, following a ban on ritual slaughter.
Piotr Kadlcik, president of the Union of Jewish Religious
Communities in Poland, confirmed to JTA on Monday from Warsaw that Poland will
run out of kosher meat within a month. The ban on ritual slaughter, or
shechitah, went into effect at the beginning of the year.
The status of ritual slaughter in Poland became unclear
in November when a Polish court ruled that the government had acted
unconstitutionally with its 2004 regulation exempting Jews and Muslims from
stunning animals before slaughtering them, as their faiths require.
The Jewish community and some legal experts say kosher
slaughter remains protected by another law, the 1997 Act on the Relation of the
State to the Jewish Communities in Poland, which states that ritual slaughter
may be performed in accordance with the needs of the local Jewish community.
Poland's Agriculture Ministry has said it will work to
enshrine ritual slaughter in Polish legislation this year that is designed to
streamline the way that Polish procedures correspond with European Union
Regulation 1099, that went into effect in January. Regulation 1099 requires
that animals do not experience “unnecessary suffering.” The EU has said
individual countries will have discretion on whether to allow or ban ritual
slaughter, however.
But ritual slaughter currently remains illegal. Polish
prosecutors began investigating reports of the March 12 kosher slaughter of a
cow in the northeastern town of Tykocin after hearing about it from a county
veterinarian in Bialystok.
Poland has about 6,000 Jews and 25,000 Muslims, according
to the European Jewish Congress and the U.S. State Department, respectively.
The country’s for-export industry of kosher and halal
meat was worth approximately $259 million at the end of last year, according to
the French news agency AFP, with kosher exports accounting for 20 percent. But
meat exports reportedly have declined by 30 percent since the beginning of the
year, the Polish Meat Association told Polish Radio, according to The Jerusalem
Post.
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