The blocking of kosher slaughter is one of the most severe blows ever dealt to the community – and it's unquestionably antisemitic
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/a-knife-to-canadian-jews/
As an opening gambit in their war against the Jews, in the early 1930s the Nazis ended shechitah, Jewish ritual slaughter. At a time when antisemitic incidents reminiscent of pre-war Germany are exploding across Canada— vandalism of Jewish owned businesses, attacks on Jewish students, firings on Jewish institutions—the Canadian government is putting forth measures that will effectively end shechitah in Canada. This devastating milestone in Canadian Jewish history has attracted no media attention and is being lost in the fog of the greater war being waged here against the Jewish people.
This past Friday, a legal Notice of Application was filed on behalf of the kashrut organizations of Canada against the Attorney General in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the implementation of new standards that will end shechitah in Canada within the next two months. The process is well underway and already one-third of abattoirs in Canada have stopped producing kosher meat. The kosher certifiers and their representatives had been working with the Canadian government to find a solution, including a recent meeting in Ottawa, but according to the application, “…those efforts have proven fruitless.”
The application asserts that ending shechitah violates the rights of Canadian Jews to practice their faith as guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As such, this new policy is one of the most severe blows ever dealt to the Canadian Jewish community, which has lived in this land for over two hundred years.
Shema Unity at The KotelKeep Watching
Speaking of blows, seal clubbing remains legal in Canada. The new regulations ending shechitah are, ostensibly, being put forward as a measure protecting animal welfare, however, selectively singling out Jewish slaughter as an odious treatment of animals has a long and ugly history, intimately intermingled with international antisemitism. As Jews, it is difficult not to feel targeted when governments go to great lengths to rationalize brutal practices of other groups but determine Jewish praxis to be barbaric. So, while the Government of Canada imposes new restrictions on how its Jewish citizens must treat animals, its website describes the sanctioned practice of sealing in Canada thus: “…the seal harvesters must shoot or strike animals on the top of the cranium, with either a firearm or a hakapik or club.” The section that contains this guideline is entitled, “Ensuring the seal harvest is humane.”
A seal hunter returns with pelts after braving the ice off the coast of Pointe-aux-Loups in the Magdalen Islands, Canada, March 29, 2008. (DAVID BOILY / AFP)
This hypocrisy, too, has a storied history. When shechitah was outlawed in Denmark in 2014, the ban came within days of the killing of 2-year-old Marius, a healthy giraffe that was deemed superfluous by the Copenhagen Zoo and consequently quelled by a bolt gun to the head, dissected publicly in front of a crowd of children, then fed to the lions.
Leading up to the Shoah, a ban on shechitah was always the first law enacted by the Germans when they conquered and occupied a new country. As noted by Prof. Dan Michman, head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research, “The Nazis perceived ritual slaughter not as a religious matter but… as a manifestation of Jews’ cruel nature.” One hardly needs to highlight the bitter irony that the Nazis banned Jewish slaughter at the same time as they were preparing their slaughter of the Jews. Beyond the ironic, it speaks to a deeper pathology of projection that continues to characterize Europe’s attitude towards the Jewish people, manifest at this moment in its post October 7 accusations of genocide against Israel.
Modern European antisemitism was, and continues to be, associated with bans on shechitah. As reported in the Times of Israel, last month the European Court of Human Rights upheld a ban on shechitah in Belgium. In reaction, Ariel Muzikant, head of the European Jewish Congress lamented: “Restrictions on fundamental aspects of Jewish religious freedom of expression, coupled with a background of massive increases in antisemitic attacks on Jewish communities, lead us to seriously consider whether Jews have a future in Europe.”
Growing up Jewish in Canada, whether we had a future here was never a question. But the recent rise of openly antisemitic demonstrations and violence in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal is frighteningly evocative of the past and present experience of Europe’s Jews, a phenomenon Canadians never expected to see on this side of the Atlantic, at least not north of the forty-ninth parallel. Among the many incidents that occurred last week alone, anti-Israel protestors descended upon Jewish neighbourhoods in Toronto and Montreal, and angry mobs intimidated attendees of synagogues in both cities. Demonstrators surrounded the Jewish Federation building in Montreal and blocked participants attending a pro-Israel event from getting in or out for hours. Poignantly, the besieged Federation building houses Quebec’s Holocaust museum; pro-Palestinian protestors in Ontario shouted, “Go back to Europe.”
And while the Canadian government’s current actions against shechitah began over a year and a half ago and may not have been rooted in overt antisemitism, the symbolic significance of shechitah ending during the worst era of anti-Jewish activism in the country cannot be overlooked.
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/a-knife-to-canadian-jews/
As an opening gambit in their war against the Jews, in the early 1930s the Nazis ended shechitah, Jewish ritual slaughter. At a time when antisemitic incidents reminiscent of pre-war Germany are exploding across Canada— vandalism of Jewish owned businesses, attacks on Jewish students, firings on Jewish institutions—the Canadian government is putting forth measures that will effectively end shechitah in Canada. This devastating milestone in Canadian Jewish history has attracted no media attention and is being lost in the fog of the greater war being waged here against the Jewish people.
This past Friday, a legal Notice of Application was filed on behalf of the kashrut organizations of Canada against the Attorney General in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the implementation of new standards that will end shechitah in Canada within the next two months. The process is well underway and already one-third of abattoirs in Canada have stopped producing kosher meat. The kosher certifiers and their representatives had been working with the Canadian government to find a solution, including a recent meeting in Ottawa, but according to the application, “…those efforts have proven fruitless.”
The application asserts that ending shechitah violates the rights of Canadian Jews to practice their faith as guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As such, this new policy is one of the most severe blows ever dealt to the Canadian Jewish community, which has lived in this land for over two hundred years.
Shema Unity at The KotelKeep Watching
Speaking of blows, seal clubbing remains legal in Canada. The new regulations ending shechitah are, ostensibly, being put forward as a measure protecting animal welfare, however, selectively singling out Jewish slaughter as an odious treatment of animals has a long and ugly history, intimately intermingled with international antisemitism. As Jews, it is difficult not to feel targeted when governments go to great lengths to rationalize brutal practices of other groups but determine Jewish praxis to be barbaric. So, while the Government of Canada imposes new restrictions on how its Jewish citizens must treat animals, its website describes the sanctioned practice of sealing in Canada thus: “…the seal harvesters must shoot or strike animals on the top of the cranium, with either a firearm or a hakapik or club.” The section that contains this guideline is entitled, “Ensuring the seal harvest is humane.”
A seal hunter returns with pelts after braving the ice off the coast of Pointe-aux-Loups in the Magdalen Islands, Canada, March 29, 2008. (DAVID BOILY / AFP)
This hypocrisy, too, has a storied history. When shechitah was outlawed in Denmark in 2014, the ban came within days of the killing of 2-year-old Marius, a healthy giraffe that was deemed superfluous by the Copenhagen Zoo and consequently quelled by a bolt gun to the head, dissected publicly in front of a crowd of children, then fed to the lions.
Leading up to the Shoah, a ban on shechitah was always the first law enacted by the Germans when they conquered and occupied a new country. As noted by Prof. Dan Michman, head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research, “The Nazis perceived ritual slaughter not as a religious matter but… as a manifestation of Jews’ cruel nature.” One hardly needs to highlight the bitter irony that the Nazis banned Jewish slaughter at the same time as they were preparing their slaughter of the Jews. Beyond the ironic, it speaks to a deeper pathology of projection that continues to characterize Europe’s attitude towards the Jewish people, manifest at this moment in its post October 7 accusations of genocide against Israel.
Modern European antisemitism was, and continues to be, associated with bans on shechitah. As reported in the Times of Israel, last month the European Court of Human Rights upheld a ban on shechitah in Belgium. In reaction, Ariel Muzikant, head of the European Jewish Congress lamented: “Restrictions on fundamental aspects of Jewish religious freedom of expression, coupled with a background of massive increases in antisemitic attacks on Jewish communities, lead us to seriously consider whether Jews have a future in Europe.”
Growing up Jewish in Canada, whether we had a future here was never a question. But the recent rise of openly antisemitic demonstrations and violence in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal is frighteningly evocative of the past and present experience of Europe’s Jews, a phenomenon Canadians never expected to see on this side of the Atlantic, at least not north of the forty-ninth parallel. Among the many incidents that occurred last week alone, anti-Israel protestors descended upon Jewish neighbourhoods in Toronto and Montreal, and angry mobs intimidated attendees of synagogues in both cities. Demonstrators surrounded the Jewish Federation building in Montreal and blocked participants attending a pro-Israel event from getting in or out for hours. Poignantly, the besieged Federation building houses Quebec’s Holocaust museum; pro-Palestinian protestors in Ontario shouted, “Go back to Europe.”
And while the Canadian government’s current actions against shechitah began over a year and a half ago and may not have been rooted in overt antisemitism, the symbolic significance of shechitah ending during the worst era of anti-Jewish activism in the country cannot be overlooked.
