Ed Gross, the Miami Beach Assistant City Manager, said today that Rabbi Manish Spitz had been hired under the city’s civil service law to supervise enforcement of the city’s law against fraud in kosher product sales but he flatly denied widespread press reports that the duties of Spitz would be limited to enforcement of that city code.
Gross, in a telephone interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, said that a law passed in 1950 set up the post of “kosher inspector” but that the City Council decided recently it did not need a code enforcement officer with duties limited to enforcement of the kosher product misrepresentation code.
He said that the law was eliminated by the City Council in January and there is no longer such a listing in the civil service roster.
Gross said that Spitz, who will begin his duties May 8, will be one of 12 code enforcement officers, all of whom have the authority to examine and report violations of the city’s kosher product code. He added that there are four other inspectors who are Jewish but said none were hired because of their religion.
He said the first man to fill the $24,000-a-year post as kosher code enforcement officer was Frank Brickman, who Gross said was not a rabbi and who served 14 years until Rabbi Joseph Kaufman was named to that position for two years until he was fired for what Gross said was a variety of offenses, including a leave of absence without notice.
Gross said that at that point, the City Council decided to abolish the special kosher law enforcement position, and to replace Kaufman with a code inspector, empowered like the other 11 inspectors, to check out all suspected code violations, including garbage disposal, zoning, weeding, housing and property regulations.
Gross said one advantage of empowering all 12 enforcement officers to include checking kosher law provisions was that non-Jewish officers could carry out such checking on the Jewish sabbath, when the five Jewish enforcement officers could be relieved or not scheduled for duty on that Jewish holiday.
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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.
