Poland, where only a few thousand Jews live today, is seeing an explosion of kosher vodkas on the shelves of its liquor stores and menus of its cafes and restaurants.
Drinking kosher vodka has become fashionable, and a plethora of brands with names like Polnisskosher, Cymes, Travka, Dawid, Rebeka and Judyta have burst onto the market in the past five years. Some in the business say there are as many as 20 different brands in all.
“Customer after customer comes in and asks for kosher vodka,” a Warsaw liquor store manager was quoted in the press as saying. “If there is no kosher vodka to be had, some clients even wander off into the night looking elsewhere for kosher vodka rather than buying another type.”
“Kosher is equated with purity, quality,” commented Stanislaw Krajewski, the Warsaw representative of the American Jewish Committee. “I’ve even recently seen mineral water labeled kosher on the market in Wroclaw!”
“Customers hope that they are drinking a better, healthier kind of alcohol, that they’re not given synthetic rubbish, and that the materials used in production were of the highest quality,” John Meyer, an expert from the Beth Din in Manchester, England, was quoted as telling the Warsaw Voice newspaper.
Meyer, said the Voice, was brought to the vodka distillery at Lancut, in southern Poland, to design production line changes that would convert the distillery to fully kosher production and enable it to get a certificate of kashrut.
He told the Voice that he did not know if all the vodkas labeled “kosher” and on sale in Poland actually were kosher.
“I can guarantee only the vodkas from Lancut,” he was quoted as saying, adding that the Lancut distillery invested several hundred thousand dollars to implement changes enabling kosher production.
The first of the new wave of kosher vodkas, Polnisskosher, began production in 1988 under the inspiration of Warsaw-born Holocaust survivor Zygmunt Nissenbaum, as a division of the state company Polmos, which at that time held a monopoly on liquor production.
Nissenbaum, who lives in Germany, directs a family foundation aimed at preserving Poland’s Jewish cultural heritage.
RIVAL CLAIMS BY TWO RABBIS
The scramble for the kosher market — both domestic and for export — came with the post-Communist introduction of a free-market economy.
The Polmos monopoly was dismantled and a series of bitter lawsuits over production rights were initiated.
The new freedoms have also nourished a festering conflict over which rabbi is competent to grant the lucrative certificates of kashrut.
Recent tension has particularly swirled around rival claims by two rabbis for the title of chief rabbi of Poland: Rabbi Menachem Joskowicz, who was brought in from Israel by the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, and Rabbi Wawa Moreino, who claims to be chief rabbi of Poland and therefore all Eastern Europe. Moreino has even unsuccessfully tried to take his case to a New York court.
Both men are Holocaust survivors from Lodz who returned part time to Poland in 1989 after living years abroad.
Joskowicz, a Gerer Hasid, went to Israel in 1947 and was brought back to Poland in May 1989 as rabbi of the only synagogue in Warsaw following talks between the Polish and Israeli religion ministers. He commutes back and forth between Warsaw and Jerusalem.
Moreino, who has lived permanently in the United States since 1973, says he was appointed chief rabbi of Poland in 1947 but removed from the position in 1955.
He has mounted a vitriolic campaign against Joskowicz, calling him an impostor and a cheat, and charging that kashrut certificates issued by Joskowicz are phoney.
Relations are so bad between the two men that disturbances have even taken place during synagogue services on Yom Kippur.
“I was once at shul and saw Moreino physically try to remove Joskowicz from the bimah,” said one Warsaw Jew. “I’m almost afraid to take guests to synagogue now for fear of what they’ll see.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
