Kapparot
Kapparot is a Jewish ritual practiced by some Jews on the eve of Yom Kippur. The person swings a live chicken or a bundle of coins over one's head three times, symbolically transferring one's sins to the chicken or coins. The chicken is then slaughtered and donated to the poor for consumption at the pre-fast meal.
Etymology
Kapparah, the singular of kapparot, means "atonement" and comes from the Hebrew root k-p-r which means "to atone".
Practice
In the Jewish religious practice of Kapparot, a rooster literally becomes a religious and sacred vessel and is swung around the head and then sacrificed on the afternoon before Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
The purpose of the sacrifice is for the expiation of the sins of the man as the chicken symbolically receives all the man's sins, which is based on the reconciliation of in the Hebrew Bible. The religious practice is mentioned for the first time by Natronai ben Hilai, Gaon of the Academy of Sura in Babylonia, in 853 C.E., who describes it as a custom of the Babylonian Jews with the practice also having been as a custom of the Persian Jews and further explained by Jewish scholars in the ninth century by that since the Hebrew word geber (gever) means both "man" and "rooster" the rooster may act and serve as a valid religious substitute and a religious and spiritual vessel in place of the man.
Taken from Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia
Every year, ultra-orthodox Jews around the world engage in an age-old ritual called kapparot, in which an individual swings a chicken over his head imbuing it with his sins. The chicken is then slaughtered and its meat donated to a local food charity.
In the above video, the animal rights activist group PETA documents abuses inconsistent with Jewish ethical laws in an attempt to convince the Jewish public that the ritual should no longer be practiced -- especially considering that Jewish law permits that money be used (and donated) as a substitute for a live animal.
In the above video, the animal rights activist group PETA documents abuses inconsistent with Jewish ethical laws in an attempt to convince the Jewish public that the ritual should no longer be practiced -- especially considering that Jewish law permits that money be used (and donated) as a substitute for a live animal.
May This Chicken Atone For Your Sins
By Shmarya Rosenberg / October 29, 2008
Earlier this month, tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews waved live chickens over their heads in a ritual known as kapparot, or "atonements." They chanted solemnly:
"This is my exchange, this is my substitute, this is my expiation. This chicken shall go to its death and I shall proceed to a good long life and peace."
As the Orthodox Jews watched, each chicken was ritually slaughtered, then donated to the poor.
Kapparot is of questionable origin. There is no mention of kapparot in the Bible or in post-Biblical Jewish literature until the Middle Ages. And many great Jewish legal scholars, including Rabbi Yosef Karo, the author of the Shulkhan Arukh (Code of Jewish Law), believed it to be of pagan origin and forbid it. According to many rabbinic opinions, kapparot can be done with money. Chickens are not necessary. But kapparot was promoted by the Hasidic movement, which these days is primarily responsible for keeping kapparot, as opposed to kapparot chickens, alive.
If kapparot was done carefully and humanely, the only argument against it would be theological. But often kapparot are neither carefully run nor humane.
Chickens are routinely transported over long distances crammed in small cages. They are not fed or given water. Many chickens die in transport.
But that isn’t all.
Once dumped on the streets of Brooklyn (or Kiryas Joel, or Miami Beach, or Jerusalem), kapparot chickens are often left to wait for another day or two without food or water or even shade. Predictably, more chickens die of heat stroke and dehydration than of ritualistic slaughter.
When the time comes for kapparot to begin, the live birds are pulled from the dead, and the swinging and chanting begins.
Then comes the slaughter. The blood pools on the ground mixed with feces; it covers the clothes and hands of workers. Wash stations and hand sanitizer is rarely provided. Children play next to dead and dying chickens.
After slaughter, the chickens are frequently tossed in heaps on the ground or in large garbage containers. Eventually – often many unrefrigerated hours later – they are collected and sent off for basic processing and, perhaps kashering as well. Then they are supposedly distributed to poor Jews to use for the Sukkot holiday that follows less than a week later.
But that is only in theory. Reality is often very different.
Last year, the animal rights group PETA caught Chabad’s Brooklyn kapparot operation dumping thousands of correctly slaughtered kosher chickens in the garbage. Even though Crown Heights has more than its share of poor Jews, the National Committee For The Furtherance of Jewish Education threw these chickens away. Why?
The logic works like this. NCFJE charged $13 per bird for kapparot. Even after expenses, the NCFJE comes out way ahead on each chicken – so much so that a kapparot worker told an undercover PETA investigator she should not worry:
"At $13, we have enough money there to purchase another chicken – so another chicken will be purchased also."
In other words, because NCFJE lacked the capacity to process the thousands of chickens slaughtered in Crown Heights, it threw some of them away. But it made enough money off the ritual to be able to purchase a regular slaughterhouse-killed and processed chicken to donate to the poor – and it did so.
NCFJE could have given those unprocessed chickens to a local non-Jewish soup kitchen or community organization. Or, it could have done better planning and processed all the chickens it killed. Instead, it dumped hundreds, perhaps thousands, of kapparot chickens into the garbage.
NCJE Chairman Rabbi Shea Hecht this week denied that chickens were thrown in the garbage. In an emailed statement, PETA’s Philip Schein responded by calling Hecht a liar:
"…On the afternoon of December 31, 2007, in a private face-to-face meeting with PETA, Rabbi Hecht and Rabbi Yosef Moya of the National Committee for Furtherance of Jewish Education (NCFJE) admitted that more than two-thirds of the slaughtered chickens at the NCFJE kapporos were disposed of and not given to tzedakah. NCFJE didn’t have the capacity to process thousands of chickens, and so the volunteers threw the garbage bags containing thousands of the slaughtered chickens into the dumpster….The garbage bags full of the dead, unused chickens are clearly shown in the PETA undercover video."
Apparently to counter PETA’s video evidence from previous years, a Chabad blog posted sanitized pictures of kapparot that do not show the slaughter or the storage of the birds.
Under fire from PETA (and from Jews who are fed up with ultra-Orthodox mistreatment of animals), NCFJE responded by claiming that PETA was out to attack Judaism.
In the same interview with Israel’s right wing settler-controlled news outlet Arutz 7 where Hecht claimed the chickens were not thrown in the garbage, the rabbi claimed PETA was out to attack Judaism. Hecht said, "[A]s a Lubavitcher Chossid, as chairman of the board at NCFJE, I suppose I represent world Jewry to these people. We will not be threatened."
To bolster his claims, Hecht also played the antisemitism/Holocaust card.
PETA launched an email campaign on its website to try to clean up – or stop – kapparot. NCFJE’s email boxes were jammed and its phones rang off the hook. One person claiming to be a PETA supporter mistakenly thought the NCFJE was blocking all emails sent by PETA’s web server. So, according to Arutz 7, he faxed the following letter to NCFJE:
"I guess you are ‘blocking’ all e-mails from PETA. Go ahead and ‘Hide’ like the little ‘[expletive deleted]‘ you are. Go molest your sisters.
LISTEN UP [expletive deleted]. I’M "GERMAN", AND I WOULD LOVE TO EXECUTE EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU… MAYBE WAVE YOU OVER GERMANS’ HEADS IN APPRECIATION OF THE HOLOCAUST. HOW DOES THAT SOUND? STOP DISGRACING THE JEWISH COMMUNITY BY INHUMANE TREATMENT OF CHICKENS. "KOSHER" MEANS "KOSHER"… YOUR PRACTICES ARE A DISGRACE AND I HOPE YOU, RABBI LEVERTOV, RABBI YOSSI BROOK, & LET’S NOT FORGET, RABBI ZALMAN OSDOBA (rabbis in the community -ed.), ALL ROT IN HELL. HAVE A [expletive deleted] LIFE. LET ME KNOW IF YOU WANT ME TO E-MAIL YOU AGAIN, I WOULD LIKE THAT.
The cruelty at your kapporos center, year after year, is a disgrace. Please make the compassionate decision to use money instead of live chickens at the NCFJE kapporos."
Only the last paragraph comes from PETA’s form email.
How your run-of-the-mill semi-literate antisemite would know the name of rabbis in the Crown Heights community (Levertov, Brook,Osdoba) not mentioned in PETA’s campaign Hecht does not bother to explain.
That did not stop him from claiming that PETA itself is antisemitic. Hecht contacted the The NYPD Hate Crimes Unit to file a complaint, and then shamelessly alerted the media to let them know what "PETA" had done.
Rabbi Luzer Weiss, director of the New York State Department of Agriculture’s Kosher Law Enforcement division, told Arutz 7 that his department received "no reports" of chicken dumping during last year’s kapparotfrom special rabbi inspectors he sent to "make the rounds ." Of course, those inspectors were sent only after PETA repeatedly filed complaints, and only after those complaints spurred Brooklyn ultra-Orthodox rabbis to act to save kapparot – facts Weiss and Arutz 7 conveniently omit. The rabbis mandated that chickens be fed and watered, not be left out in the sun, and that various health measures be taken. Little if any of those changes are visible on PETA’s video of NCFJE’s Crown Heights kapparot.
In fairness to the NCFJE, some of PETA’s claims of chicken mishandling by kapparot goers (as opposed to kapparot workers) seem wrong. Most of the hasidim in the video look to me to be handling the chickens correctly.
The NCFJE’s Hecht is perhaps most infamous for his claims made early this summer during a period of racial tension in Crown Heights.
Explaining why Lubavitchers refused to tell police the names of the fellow members of their sect who beat a young innocent black man on way home from school, Hecht told the New York Daily News that Lubavitchers couldn’t cooperate with police. Why? Simple. Cooperation, Hecht claimed , is against Jewish law:
"The Hebrew word is mesira, which means basically you are not allowed to be an informant. In essence, I am not allowed to snitch, period."
For seven years, Shea Hecht was a Commissioner of Human Rights for the city of New York
Attorney Michael Lesher says that Hecht, when he served as a member of Brooklyn D.A. Charles Hynes Jewish advisory council, lobbied Hynes to stop extradition of accused ultra-Orthodox child molester Avrohom Mondrowitz from his hideout in Israel. Presumably Hecht’s reason for trying to block extradition is similar to his reason for not helping police catch the Lubavitch thugs who beat that black man.
In early October, Hecht asserted the Rubashkin family of Chabad hasidim, owners of the notorious meatpacker Agriprocessors, are being treated unfairly. Why?
According to Hecht, the scandals surrounding Agriprocessors are mere "allegations," and those allegations "are imagined and all of them stem either from the antagonistic press, self-hating Jewish animal advocates, overzealous Immigration P.R. news people, and a gaggle of anti-Semitic perennial criticizers ."
Hecht is a leader of Crown Height’s Lubavitchers. He is also a radio show host, political activist and sometime humanitarian. Many years ago, he was my first teacher in yeshiva.
In Crown Heights, Hecht’s views are not in the least bit extreme.
Source: Jewcy.com
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Jewish leaders want to end animal killing
October 2011
For generations, ultra-Orthodox Jews have marked Yom Kippur by swinging live chickens over their heads while saying a blessing, then slaughtering the birds as a symbolic way to rid their souls of sins.
Now some rabbis are decrying the practice as animal abuse.
These rabbis say the ritual, along with the cruel conditions the chickens are kept in, violate Jewish law, which has strict rules on the care and slaughter of animals.
Rabbi Meir Hirsch began having second thoughts about the practice, known as kaparot, or atonement in Hebrew, when he noticed chickens squawking in distress in plastic cages near his house.
Butchers "bring the chickens from the farm at night, and they spend all day in the sun without food or drink," said Hirsch, a member of the Neturei Karta ultra-Orthodox sect in Jerusalem. "You cannot perform a commandment by committing a sin."
The tradition dates at least 800 years and calls for believers to wave a live chicken three times over their heads ahead of the arrival of Yom Kippur, Judaism's holiest day, which begins at sundown Friday. After slaughter, religious Jews often donate the meat to charity.
Jewish leaders across Israel and the United States have called for an end to the practice for years, but leaders of insular ultra-Orthodox communities have been resistant.
The controversy surrounding kaparot stretches back centuries.
Rabbi Joseph Karo, one of the major codifiers of Jewish law, called it a "foolish custom" reminiscent of pagan practices. Since his 16th century pronouncement, Jews of Sephardic, or Middle Eastern, origin have tended to perform kaparot without animals, sometimes swinging sacks of coins above their heads before donating the money to charity.
Those following Ashkenazi, or European, customs, have continued to use chickens.
Hirsch said he now waves a $10 bill above his head instead of a chicken. While Hirsch's sect of several thousand members in Jerusalem is relatively small, calls for reform are spreading to other streams of Orthodoxy.
Yehuda Shein, a community activist in the Jerusalem suburb of Beit Shemesh, founded an ultra-Orthodox animal rights group last year. This year, about 50 activists from his group, Behemla, or "in compassion," handed out flyers citing rabbinical opposition to performing kaparot on chickens.
"People doing kaparot think only about holding onto the chicken, and they think they did a good deed of donating the chicken to charity. But they don't understand the pain the animal endured," Shein said.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
For generations, ultra-Orthodox Jews have marked Yom Kippur by swinging live chickens over their heads while saying a blessing, then slaughtering the birds as a symbolic way to rid their souls of sins.
Now some rabbis are decrying the practice as animal abuse.
These rabbis say the ritual, along with the cruel conditions the chickens are kept in, violate Jewish law, which has strict rules on the care and slaughter of animals.
Rabbi Meir Hirsch began having second thoughts about the practice, known as kaparot, or atonement in Hebrew, when he noticed chickens squawking in distress in plastic cages near his house.
Butchers "bring the chickens from the farm at night, and they spend all day in the sun without food or drink," said Hirsch, a member of the Neturei Karta ultra-Orthodox sect in Jerusalem. "You cannot perform a commandment by committing a sin."
The tradition dates at least 800 years and calls for believers to wave a live chicken three times over their heads ahead of the arrival of Yom Kippur, Judaism's holiest day, which begins at sundown Friday. After slaughter, religious Jews often donate the meat to charity.
Jewish leaders across Israel and the United States have called for an end to the practice for years, but leaders of insular ultra-Orthodox communities have been resistant.
The controversy surrounding kaparot stretches back centuries.
Rabbi Joseph Karo, one of the major codifiers of Jewish law, called it a "foolish custom" reminiscent of pagan practices. Since his 16th century pronouncement, Jews of Sephardic, or Middle Eastern, origin have tended to perform kaparot without animals, sometimes swinging sacks of coins above their heads before donating the money to charity.
Those following Ashkenazi, or European, customs, have continued to use chickens.
Hirsch said he now waves a $10 bill above his head instead of a chicken. While Hirsch's sect of several thousand members in Jerusalem is relatively small, calls for reform are spreading to other streams of Orthodoxy.
Yehuda Shein, a community activist in the Jerusalem suburb of Beit Shemesh, founded an ultra-Orthodox animal rights group last year. This year, about 50 activists from his group, Behemla, or "in compassion," handed out flyers citing rabbinical opposition to performing kaparot on chickens.
"People doing kaparot think only about holding onto the chicken, and they think they did a good deed of donating the chicken to charity. But they don't understand the pain the animal endured," Shein said.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
In 2012, Kapparot will start on sunset on September 25
Below: an Ultra-Orthodox Jewish boy looks at chickens as Ultra-Orthodox preform the Kaparot ceremony on September 20, 2012 in Bnei Brak, Israel. The Jewish ritual is supposed to transfer the sins of the past year to the chicken, and is performed before the Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur, the most important day in the Jewish calendar, which this year will start on sunset on September 25.
Pictures via Zimbio.com (September 19, 2012 - Source: Uriel Sinai/Getty Images Europe)
Pictures via Zimbio.com (September 19, 2012 - Source: Uriel Sinai/Getty Images Europe)
Please take action
Sign petition - send emails!
Please the petition started by the Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos that seeks to replace chickens in kaporos rituals for 3 principal reasons:
The use of chickens as kaporos is cruel. They suffer in being held with their wings pinned backward, in being swung over the heads of practitioners, and in being packed in crates, often for days without food or water leading up to the ritual, which violates tsa'ar ba'alei chaim, the mandate prohibiting cruelty to animals.
The use of chickens is not required by Jewish law. It is not a mitzvah but a custom that originated in the middle ages.
There is an acceptable substitute that not only avoids cruelty but can help reduce hunger and show compassion. Money can be used as a non-animal alternative, and funds raised can be given directly to charities that provide food for the poor and hungry throughout the year, including 13,000 Jewish families living at or below the poverty line in New York City.
By signing this petition using the widget below, or directly at change.org by clicking here the following message will be sent to:
Agudath Israel of America
Rabbi David Zwiebel, Executive Vice President
42 Broadway
New York, NY 10004
Via Email: DZwiebel@agudathisrael.org
The use of chickens as kaporos is cruel. They suffer in being held with their wings pinned backward, in being swung over the heads of practitioners, and in being packed in crates, often for days without food or water leading up to the ritual, which violates tsa'ar ba'alei chaim, the mandate prohibiting cruelty to animals.
The use of chickens is not required by Jewish law. It is not a mitzvah but a custom that originated in the middle ages.
There is an acceptable substitute that not only avoids cruelty but can help reduce hunger and show compassion. Money can be used as a non-animal alternative, and funds raised can be given directly to charities that provide food for the poor and hungry throughout the year, including 13,000 Jewish families living at or below the poverty line in New York City.
By signing this petition using the widget below, or directly at change.org by clicking here the following message will be sent to:
Agudath Israel of America
Rabbi David Zwiebel, Executive Vice President
42 Broadway
New York, NY 10004
Via Email: DZwiebel@agudathisrael.org
The petition letter
Greetings,
I am writing to express my objection to the use of chickens in kaporos rituals, and to ask you respectfully to use your influence to encourage the use of money or other non-animal symbols of atonement instead of chickens in the observance of this ritual.
The swinging and slaughtering of chickens and the suffering they endure in the kaporos process is not required by Jewish law, but is rather a custom in a ceremony that no sentient creature is needed for. As the renowned Orthodox Rabbi, David Rosen, stated on August 25, 2011, "using live fowl for this custom desecrates the prohibition against 'tsa'ar ba'alei chaim,'" the Jewish mandate not to cause harm to animals. I am deeply concerned that the chickens often go for days locked in crates leading up to the ritual with little or no food and water, and that even shelter is often denied them during this time. I am distressed by the callous manner in which practitioners hold the birds, with their wings pinned painfully backward and their legs hanging pitifully, as if they were inanimate objects, unworthy of kindness, mercy, or respect.
I believe that regarding these birds as symbolic recipients of practitioners' sins and punishment encourages the hurtful and dismissive treatment they receive, which is all the more distressing given that money can be used, and the funds raised can be given directly to charities that provide food for the poor and hungry throughout the year. In a letter to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Israel in 2010, Orthodox Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, head of Jerusalem's Yeshivat Ateret Cohanim, argued that in addition to avoiding kashrut problems and cruelty to animals, conducting the atonement ceremony with money instead of chickens also fulfills "the great mitzva of helping poor people."
The Jewish tradition is filled with concepts, prayers and actions during the Rosh Hashanah-Yom Kippur period stressing the importance of compassion and sensitivity, and the Talmud observes that the concept of tsa'ar ba'alei chaim includes the direction not only to avoid needlessly hurting animals, but to show them compassion.
I therefore respectfully urge you to encourage the replacement of chickens in kaporos rituals with money or other nonsentient symbols of atonement, given that animals are not needed to perform the ritual and that the use of money is perfectly acceptable under Jewish law. In the words of Orthodox Rabbi Shlomo Segal, Rabbi of Beth Shalom of Kings Bay in Brooklyn, "Giving money is not only a more humane method of performing the practice of Kapparot but it is also a more efficient way of ensuring that those who are in need will receive the requisite assistance."
Thank you for your attention.
Sincerely,
[Your name]
N.B. We highly encourage writing personalized and original letters, as they get a lot of attention from recipients.
Contact addresses
Agudath Israel of America
Rabbi David Zwiebel, Executive Vice President
42 Broadway
New York, NY 10004
Via Email: DZwiebel@agudathisrael.org
ORTHODOX UNION
Rabbi Steven Weil, Chief Executive Officer
11 Broadway
New York, NY 10004
Direct Line: 212-613-8101
Office Phone: 212-563-4000
Email: rabbiweil@ou.org
Website Contact: http://www.ou.org/contact/C390
Website: http://www.ou.org
RABBINICAL COUNCIL OF AMERICA
Rabbi Moshe Kletenik, President
305 7th Avenue, 12th Floor
New York, NY 10001
Phone: 212-807-9000
Fax: 212-727-8452
Email Rabbi Kletenik: mkletenik@rabbis.org
Email: office@rabbis.org
Website Contact: http://www.rabbis.org/contact_us.cfm
Website: http://www.rabbis.org
NEW YORK BOARD OF RABBIS
Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, Executive Vice President
136 East 39th Street, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10016
Phone: 212-983-3521
Fax: 212-983-3531
Email Rabbi Potasnik: jpotasnik@nybr.org
Office Email: Info@nybr.org
Website Contact: http://nybr.org/contact.htm
Website: http://nybr.org
Email block: DZwiebel@agudathisrael.org, rabbiweil@ou.org, mkletenik@rabbis.org, jpotasnik@nybr.org
For more information see: http://www.EndChickensAsKaporos.com
