CSENGELE, Hungary (AP) – In a small room filled with religious texts, a Jewish rabbi demonstrates how knives are sharpened and inspected before they are used to cut the throats of chickens, geese, and other poultry at a kosher slaughterhouse in Hungary.
A shochet, someone trained and certified to slaughter animals according to Jewish tradition, cuts a knife at progressively finer stones before pulling the knife over a fingernail to feel any imperfections in the steel that could prevent a smooth, clean cut and cause unnecessary pain.
“One of the most important things about kosher is that the animal does not suffer,” says Rabbi Jacob Werchow, who oversees production at Quality Poultry, a 3 1/2 year old slaughterhouse that supplies nearly 40% of kosher poultry in Europe. . market and much of the foie gras sold in Israel.
The methods employed at the facility in the village of Csengele are based on ancient Judaic principles that prescribe the humane treatment of living things. They are also central to a debate about how to balance animal and religious rights, as parts of Europe restrict or effectively prohibit the ritual slaughtering practices of Jews and Muslims.
Companies like Quality Poultry have found new export markets since the highest court of the European Union last month passed a law in the Belgian Flemish Region that prohibited the slaughter of animals without first stuning them unconscious. But the ruling of the European Court of Justice has also raised fears about a possible EU-wide ban on ritual slaughter and has brought back memories of periods when European Jews faced brutal persecution.
“This decision has consequences not only for the Belgian Jewish community, but for all of us,” said Rabbi Slomo Koves of the Association of Hungarian Jewish Communities, which owns the Csengele slaughterhouse. “If this is the case in Belgium and the court has given it moral approval, it could start a trial on a larger scale. If you follow this logic, the next step is that you can’t sell meat this way in these countries either. “
The EU has required pre-stunning animals since 1979, but allows Member States to make religion-based exceptions. Most do, but along with Flanders and Wallonia in Belgium, Slovenia, Denmark and Sweden, as well as non-EU member states Switzerland, Iceland and Norway, have abolished religious exemptions, meaning kosher and halal meat must be imported.
Animal rights groups say cutting the throats of livestock and poultry birds while they are conscious causes suffering that amounts to animal cruelty. Stunning methods vary, but the procedure is usually done by means of an electric shock or firing gun on the animal’s skull.
“Reversible stunning is the bare minimum we can do to protect animals,” said Reineke Hameleers, CEO of the Brussels-based Eurogroup for Animals. “They must be made unconscious before they are killed.”
The situation is not so cut and dried for religious observers. Jewish law prohibits injuring or damaging animal tissue before slaughter, and modern stunning practices can cause death or irreparable injuries that would make meat and poultry non-kosher, according to Koves.
While some Islamic religious authorities considered pre-slaughter intoxication permissible, local Muslim groups argued that the requirements for intoxication in Flanders and Wallonia stemmed from the efforts of the Islamophobic far-right in Belgium 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 intensive process of sharpening and inspecting the blades, the shochet is trained to make the cut in a single smooth motion, cutting the nerves of the animal and draining blood from the brain in seconds.
“Whatever you think … whether kosher slaughter is better for the animal than regular slaughter, you are basically putting animal rights above human rights,” Koves said. “If people are going to ban our rights to kosher food, it means they are limiting our human rights. And this, especially in a place like Europe, brings us very bad memories. ”
Laws requiring the stunning of animals before slaughter appeared in some European countries as early as the late 1800s. Adolf Hitler gave the mandate in 1933, just after he became Chancellor of Germany, one of the first laws imposed by the Nazis.
Jewish and Muslim groups sued Flemish law at the Belgian Constitutional Court, which referred it to the European Court of Justice for a ruling on its compatibility with EU law.
The Advocate General of the Court of Justice advised the court to delete Flemish law, arguing that it violated the rights of certain religions to preserve their essential religious rites. But the court disagreed, finding that the law “allows a fair balance to be struck between the importance attached to animal welfare and the freedom of Jewish and Muslim believers to practice their religion.”
The animal welfare minister of the Brussels region of Belgium, where stunning is not compulsory, said the ruling would reinvigorate the mandatory stunning debate there. The Brussels branch of the New Flemish Alliance, a center-right party whose members led pressure for the law in Flanders, said it would now propose a regulation to ban slaughter without anesthesia in the capital region.
The Hungarian government helped finance the Csengele slaughterhouse, and Prime Minister Viktor Orban joined Jewish groups and condemned the court’s decision as an attack on religious freedom. In a January letter to the US-based Jewish Agency for Israel, Orban wrote that his government “would do anything to raise our vote against (the decision) in any possible international forum.”
Koves and other Chief Rabbis in Europe are exploring ways to appeal the EU court decision.