In Postville, Iowa, kosher is kosher

This article appeared in the National Geographic Magazine a few months ago, yet it still is a very good article.

“Slaughtering an animal is a bloody business,” says Sholom Rubashkin, a manager at AgriProcessors, one of the largest kosher meatpacking plants in the country. A video secretly filmed last year in Rubashkin’s plant in Postville, Iowa, by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) demonstrates just how bloody. For an animal to be considered kosher, it must be killed by a swift cut across the throat with a perfectly sharpened knife. This ritual slaughter, called shehitah, is designed to ensure that death is nearly instantaneous. But the video shows cows moving, even trying to get up after being cut. PETA says this violates humane slaughtering laws and that the plant should be prosecuted.

Rubashkin says the video, shot over seven weeks, selectively shows those few cases in which a cow, though rendered unconscious, may not look like it was killed instantly—he compares the animal’s movements to a chicken with its head cut off. As he takes me on a tour of the chicken-processing side of the slaughterhouse—the birds’ featherless bodies clicking along on an overhead conveyor belt—he says the criticism is an attack not only on his company but also on an ancient tradition. “I think PETA is after the shehitah process,” he says in a staccato Brooklyn accent that has not softened after years in the Midwest. “They’d love to make it illegal.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is now investigating AgriProcessors, and in February PETA launched a national ad campaign against them. This isn’t the first time the Rubashkin operation has attracted controversy to Postville. In 1987 Sholom’s father, Aaron, purchased the then defunct meat-processing plant, and eventually some 250 Hasidic Jews moved to town. When I ask Rubashkin how the family decided on Postville, he says, “It was divine providence. God wanted us here.”