he couldn’t be deceived, and that under any and all conditions he knew kosher from non-kosher meat.
Taking the expert at his word, Samuel Rosenblum, attorney, of 521 Fifth avenue, brought four pieces of steak, purchased half an hour before court opened, and asked Frankel to decide which two were kosher and which two weren’t. The expert proved not so expert in his choices and the defense counsel’s client was, as a result, acquitted by Justices Brady, Hackenberg and Cauldwell.
The dietary law at point was whether hind quarter meat could be kosher. The inspector said “No” but Rabbi Bukatman, associated with the Zion National Products, said that hind quarter meat from which a menacher (expert on kashruth) trabers, that is, removes the veins from the meat, he thereby makes kosher that meat which otherwise would be trefe.
Checking upon the ruling of the modern Solomons who let the meat speak for itself, just as Solomon thousands of years before let the child choose its own mother, a Jewish Daily Bulletin reporter ascertained that when a menacher trabers, meat does become kosher.
Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein, honorary president of the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations and rabbi of the Institutional Synagogue, an authority on kashruth, stated that Rabbi Bukatman was right in his contention.
BACK TO THE BIBLE
“If,” he said, “the menacher is an expert at trabering, hind-quarter meat is made kosher by the process.”
Checking even further back in order to ascertain the cause of the misunderstanding, it was discovered in the Jewish Encyclopedia that “the custom of refraining from eating the sinews of the hind legs of an animal arose, according to the Biblical narrative (Gen. XXXII. 32) from the incident of Jacob’s wrestling with the angel, through which the patriarch became lame.
“It is not put in the form of a prohibition in the legal portions of the Bible,” the Encyclopedia continues, “although the Rabbis considered it of Mosaic origin.”
And as an epilogue to this little game of “Kosher, kosher, is it kosher?” Rabbi Goldstein pointed out to the reporter that the meat products of the Zion National Products do not carry the stamp of approval of his organization, the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations or the Agudath Habonim, the two leading authorities on kashruth.”
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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.
