German experts consider the Nazi prohibition on kosher slaughtering still legally valid and only temporarily in abeyance, it was learned here in the wake of a call for the outlawing of Shechitah issued by the recent annual convention of the German Animal Protection League.
The convention, meeting here under the chairmanship of Frankfurt’s Mayor Walter Kolb, adopted a formal resolution assailing Shechitah and urging the competent governmental authorities to suppress it by cancelling “the exceptions heretofore permitted.” This astounding formulation was based on the contention that the killing of animals according to Jewish ritual was possible only because of a special dispensation of the occupation powers and in fact violated existing German law. The German authorities shared this point of view, stressed a convention speaker, but were afraid of stirring up so politically delicate an issue.
The chairman of the Rabbinical Association of Germany. Hesse Chief Rabbi Dr. Zvi H. Levy, thereupon sought clarification of the legal status of Shechitah, which is practiced in half a dozen German cities, from the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture. To his consternation the two specialists of the Ministry, a legal expert and a veterinarian, told him that, even though the individual states might be permitting kosher slaughtering in practice, the Nazi anti-Shechitah decree of April, 1933 had in their view not been rescinded and was still on the books. It was, they argued after rehashing all the discredited arguments of the Nazi agitators against Shechitah, a humane and not an anti-Jewish measure.
The Central Council of the Jews in Germany is endeavoring to obtain from higher officials an authoritative interpretation, making it clear that the repeal of all Nazi legislation also applies to Hitler’s April 1933 decree and that the Jewish mode of slaughtering is protected by virtue of the constitutional safeguards against religious discrimination, not merely by the presence of the occupation power. Meanwhile, “Deutsche Fleischer,” the German butchers’ trade magazine, has published an attack on Schechitah.
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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.
