Would you like some milk with your pork?
Filed under: A New Reality, Business, Food, General, Religion, Travel
A ham melt on rye - does that make it kosher?
Usually the latter has been the best bet, as the vegetarian offerings also assume that the diner is a vegan and usually offers something indescribable as food (the airline chefs fault, not the vegans god bless them) and the kosher option usually looks like it had been sealed with solid bond packing tape that takes most of the flight to pry off.
But kosher travelers on an EasyJet flight from Tel Aviv to London last week discovered that they were not given even those meager options – the choice of inflight fare was either bacon baguettes and ham melts, both frowned upon by the Jewish tradition.
EasyJet authorities scrambled their eggs to wipe the yolk off their faces, apologizing to irate passengers for the gaffe on the flight, which had been inaugurated a few months earlier.
The kosher menu they presented at the time included egg mayonnaise and tomato sandwiches, smoked salmon and cream cheese bagels, mozzarella and tomato Panini, and a muffin or chocolate orange mini cake – and no mention of Porky Pig. But apparently, the wrong food trays had been loaded onto the plane at Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv.
One passenger returning from Tel Aviv to his home in London, Victor Kaufman, 25, told the Daily Mail that the airline needed to learn from their embarrassing snafu.
“I think they need a lesson or two on cultural awareness if they expand their routes into the Middle East. It is not just Jewish passengers who do not eat pork but Muslim ones too,” he said.
EasyJet operates over 525 routes in 29 countries, and a spokesman told the Daily Mail that it was company policy to not load pork produce on to the four-hour flights to and from Israel.
“For flights to Israel, easyJet’s standard practice is to offer kosher and vegetarian sandwiches onboard. We do also offer non kosher products onboard these flights but it is our policy to not load any pork products. It appears that a mistake was made on this particular flight and that incorrect food canisters were loaded onto the aircraft. We would like to apologize to the passengers and can confirm we have done everything we can to ensure that this does not happen again.”
The passengers should be thankful actually. At least it wasn’t a transatlantic flight to the US. And the offerings could have been even worse – the airline version of vegan.
Seeing sea food in Rehovot
Filed under: Business, Food, General, Israeliness, Life
Common knowledge has it that people who live in Tel Aviv are the ones surrounded by a bubble protecting them from the realities of the country they live in. But I’ve decided that living in the Jersualem area is really the Israeli ‘bubble.’
On a day trip yesterday to the Rehovot area for a visit to the fascinating Ayalon Institute where a clandestine bullet factory was in operation during the pre-state 1945-48 period, and to the Weizmann Institute Science Fair, we stopped off at a local mall to pick up a few things.
Browsing around, we came upon a Tiv Ta’am supermarket. Even though there are a reported 32 stores in the country, there aren’t any in Jerusalem and its environs, so we decided to go in and look around.
First of all, it’s as close to an American super as you can get – spacious, attractive layout, inviting fruit and vegetable sections. Just a great shopping environment.
And it has some interesting import labels and items that I haven’t seen in other supers. But the first big surprise was entering the frozen fish aisle and seeing a whole row of frozen shrimp, calamary, and other assorted non-kosher delicacies. Turning around to the fresh fish section, we encountered a tray of scallops and assorted crab legs.
The sheer weirdness of seeing those items in an Israeli supermarket had our eyes bugging out. After 25 years of entering kosher-only supers, it was genuinely an eye-opener.
“I feel just like a tourist,” I said, and a a shopper standing in line at the fish counter turned around and smiled.
I actually did purchase something – packages of imported frozen fake crabmeat made from kosher fish – an item which used to be available throughout the country until the local company producing it went out of business. It’s great for sushi or crab rolls if you keep kosher.
We didn’t even get to the meat counter where we were told various pork products are on prominently on display. What we experienced was enough of a shock for one day.
Yoga puts religious Israelis in an uncomfortable position
Filed under: A New Reality, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Religion, Sports
Today’s Western societies are into all kinds of Eastern recreational and spiritual pursuits. There are also scores of Israelis from multiple generations returning home from backpacking jaunts to India and elsewhere in the East on an ongoing basis. Combine the two phenomena, and the booming popularity of yoga in Israel seems like an obvious eventuality.
For Israelis who are interested in spirituality avenues that are new to them, regardless of potential conflict with their Jewish roots, yoga is hardly a problem. But for the increasing numbers of Israeli Orthodox Jews who are experimenting with flavors from other faiths and integrating them into their own traditional frameworks, yoga isn’t always a straightforward pursuit.
Other spiritual paths might be less problematic for religious Jews looking to pepper things up: Buddhism, for example, is often justified on the grounds that it is essentially a code of ethics with possibly nothing to teach in terms of deities. And other religions have their own potential beefs (pardon the apropos expression) with yoga. However, some Jewish theologians, including a well-publicized responsum by Chabad Rabbi Tzvi Freeman, have justified yoga practice among Jews on the grounds that one ought not throw the baby out with the bathwater – in other words, just because many yoga practitioners include chants dedicated to multiple deities in their practices, that doesn’t mean that the spirit-calming and body-stretching advantages of yoga ought to be avoided.
Another complication to the situation is that it might not be so straightforward that yoga’s Hindu chants to more than one god represent idolatry. Many other theologians have posited that since they all essentially represent manifestations of the one primary godhead, Brahman, the additional Hindu gods can be seen as analogous to Jewish mysticism’s concept of the sephirot, the kabalistic manifestations of the Jewish God’s various components of holiness.
Regardless, there are thousands of religious Israelis who are simply scared of yoga’s spiritual elements and prefer to focus on its exercise-based advantages. Case in point is Californian immigrant yogi Aviva Schmidt, whose yoga studio in Jerusalem, “Power Flow,” has been christened by Ha’aretz as “Israel’s first kosher power yoga studio.”
Located in Jerusalem’s posh Rehavia neighborhood, “Power Flow” specializes in power yoga, which is different from conventional yoga in that the exercises are quicker and more exhausting. “They call it yoga for athletes,” Schmidt said. “It’s not your slow, meditative and gentle yoga, it’s a workout.”
As Schmidt explains her approach to the conundrum….
“Yoga is based on Eastern tradition and focuses a lot on meditation. Different positions are worshipping different idols, which goes against Judaism. So I keep it very pareve: for example, I don’t say the names of the positions, there is no chanting, no ohming. I do focus on the breathing, as this is very important in yoga, but any kind of eastern philosophy stays outside.”
Hey, whatever floats your boat. We’ve heard of kosher cell phones and kosher sex, so kosher yoga? Why not.
Image of Israelis doing yoga courtesy zivpu from Flickr under a Creative Commons license.
Israeli wine buying season – even on a budget
The weeks leading up to Passover represent the lion’s share of the kosher wine industry’s annual sales. Just like December is the peak season for general retail revenues every year, post-Purim early spring is where it’s at for kosher wine transaction volume. Young wines from the fall harvest are starting to be bottled and marketed at this time, and those handling the wine buying for a Seder must procure enough for the proverbial four cups consumed by each participant as part of the Haggadah’s rituals, meaning around one full bottle per person – plus whatever’s consumed separately during the meal.
And just as consumer retail columnists formulated analyses and advice columns this past December, focusing on how to make solstice holiday purchases where one garners maximum bang for one’s buck in today’s tough economic climate, Ha’aretz‘s renowned wine critic Daniel Rogov recently released a highly practical guide to affordable spring 2009 kosher Israeli wines:
For several years, knowledgeable wine drinkers have known that the best buys in the country were the Tabor, Galil Mountain and Dalton wineries as well as in the Gamla series of the Golan Heights Winery. Those wines are now being joined by wines from the Zion winery and, while those may not make for the most sophisticated drinking, they do offer excellent value.
He goes on to rate nine kosher Zion winery (their Hebrew-only official site) products, all of which falling well within his “good to very good” stratum of scoring.
Rogov is getting out there more and more nowadays, serving as a formidable advocate of Israeli oenophilia. I’ve written about Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV before, and the enthusiastic eccentric personality also seemingly has Passover fever nowadays, having welcomed Rogov himself recently on the program (check out the fascinating 38-minute episode here). The banter-laden rapport between the two alone makes the video worth watching.
To Israeli wine lovers like you and me, this is not all big news (the fact that kosher wine no longer exclusively resembles cough syrup, and the fact that great Israeli wine is not exclusively kosher – we’ve known these things for years), but it’s great to see more and more mainstream wine-oriented media channels recognizing the quality coming out of this part of the world.
A festivus for the kosher eaters in us
Filed under: Business, Food, General, Religion
Running parallel to the kosher wine revolution (which has taught us over the past 15 years or so that it doesn’t have to be grape cough syrup to be rabbinically approved) has been the kosher food revolution (which has taught us over the past 10 years or so that it doesn’t have to be boiled chicken necks to be rabbinically approved). Much has been written about the kosher gourmet scene in various cities, and as affluence and religious observance become decreasingly exclusive concepts, the scene has only flourished.
Case in point with the Chef Eats Kosher Festival, already underway at 40 restaurants all over Israel and running through Thursday. Part co-opted marketing campaign, part celebration of a niche business community’s renaissance, and part charity drive (more on this below), Chef Eats Kosher is the brainchild of production company One Mouth. In a statement released through their publicity agents, One Mouth principles Tal Nechemia and Eran Zingler summed up the wave they’re riding:
“In recent years, we’ve seen a steady increase in crowds of people looking for experiences going out that are high-quality yet kosher. Tens of thousands came to the first kosher festival in Petach Tikva that we put on this summer, and the success of the Chef Eats Kosher Festivals in recent years has encouraged us to bring it back….”
The main draw to this fourth incarnation of Chef Eats Kosher is its affordability: When else can one enjoy a specialty three-course meal at a top-tier (well, most of them are top-tier, anyway – Jerusalem’s only participating eatery is, strangely, the local branch of the Yotvata café) restaurant for the extremely affordable price of NIS 84?
And at every Chef Eats Kosher-participating table are envelopes for donations to Table to Table, a Ra’anana-based organization which rescues leftovers from restaurants and events and serves them to the needy. The Table to Table-Chef Eats Kosher charity drive alone aims to help some 5000 schoolchildren, although the envelopes on the tables are for cash donations.
A partial list of 2008′s Chef Eats Kosher restaurants appears in English, along with some recommendations, here, while the full, Hebrew-only list can be seen here.
Photo courtesy Dan Peretz.
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