The Kashruth Association of Greater New York Friday began intensive preparations for the first court test of its power to dominate the kosher poultry industry by its system of tagging chickens with patented “plombes” or leg-bands, to attest to the fact that they have been supervised by the association’s agents.
A court move which had been brewing for several months and which had been forecast in the Jewish Daily Bulletin as long ago as lost Fall, became a fact when the S.S. & B. Live Poultry Corporation, 2962 Park Avenue, Bronx started action in Supreme Court to enjoin the association from “advertising, publishing or circularizing any statement that this plaintiff is disobeying rabbinical laws or customs, tradition or precedents of the orthodox Hebrew religious requirements with reference to dietary laws as they apply to poultry.”
The complaint was served on the association at its office, 1123 Broadway, and a hearing is scheduled before Justice Peter Schmuck July 1.
ACTION IS DENOUNCED
In statement to the Bulletin Friday, Rabbi Nachman H. Ebin, chairman of the association’s administrative committee, and Louis J. Gribetz, counsel, denounced the action as an attempt to subvert rabbinical authority.
“All we can say at the present time without entering into the legal aspects of the matter,” said Rabbi Ebin, “is that the rabbinate is glad that a fight carried on surreptitiously up to now by the unscrupulous element in the poultry industry has now been brought into the open.”
Mr. Gribetz characterized the suit as a “bold and brazen challenge to the orthodox rabbinate.”
The “plombes” system was instituted last Fall by an issur, or rabbinical ban, on all poultry not bearing the leg-bands. The plaintiff, represented by Allan Deutsch, complains that the leg-bands cost the association $1.45 a thousand and are sold to the poultry wholesalers at $10.00 a thousand.
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