Kashruth Fight on Supervision Reported over

Internal strife within the Kashruth Association over the question of centralized versus localized rabbinical supervision of poultry markets was practically settled yesterday after a week of closed conferences, it was reported.

In Borough Park, Brooklyn, where a group of rabbis had manufactured leg-bands similar to those of the Kashruth Association and were negotiating for supervision contracts with poultry market owners, a settlement was practically assured yesterday whereby the Borough Park rabbis would abandon their plan for local supervision in return for representation in the central executive board of the Kashruth Association.

The Kashruth Association yesterday announced that it has employed 200 mashgachin or religious supervisors for poultry markets throughout the city. Most of these are unemployed slaughterers in accordance with an agreement between the Kashruth Association and Shochtim Union Local 440.

The Kashruth Association plombes are being used in every poultry market in the city. Nearly 2,000,000 of the leg-bands have been used since the rabbinical ban on unlabeled poultry went into effect three weeks ago.

The one remaining threat to Kashruth Association control of the markets was the retail poultry dealers—particularly the butchers.

In the Bronx, attempts by wholesalers to bill butchers for the plombes, for which they are paying the association one cent each, failed, as the butchers disregarded these items on their poultry bills.

Threatening a complete stoppage, 2,000 butchers will hold a mass meeting Sunday and appoint a strike committee in an effort to force the Federal government to investigate the practice of tagging chickens.

Bronx poultry wholesalers, providing bitter opponents of Kashruth Association supervision of their markets, yesterday indicated that they will content themselves with the supervision and turn to Judge Otto A. Rosalsky, the Mayor’s poultry mediator, for aid in passing the cost of supervision to the consumer.