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300 Rabbis, including the Chief Rabbi of Israel, vowed at a conference of the Rabbinical Center of Europe (RCE) to “wake the EU from its dangerous slumber” by engaging in a concerted campaign of outreach and awareness raising at EU and Member State level, said RCE Director Rabbi Menachem Margolin Tuesday. […] The two-day conference dealt with issues affecting Jewish Law, heard many more voices than usual saying that a line needed to be drawn, and that the EU needed to do much, much more to defend religious freedom across Europe. Rabbi Margolin said in a statement: “Never before have...

Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, said on the weekend he disagreed with the call of the incoming president of the British Veterinary Association (BVA), John Blackwell, to ban shechita (Jewish ritual slaughter) and Islamic halal slaughter. Clegg said, according to the BBC, that stopping this type of slaughter would “remove the right of Jewish communities in this country, Muslim communities in this country, to stick to their religious beliefs about how they prepare food and how animals are slaughtered.” The Jewish Chronicle quoted Clegg as having said that “no government of which I’m part” would ban shechita. …

Denmark has a not-so-kosher beef with Jewish tradition. In February, Denmark's Agriculture and Food Minister Dan Jorgensen approved a new regulation which stipulates that the slaughter of animals cannot be undertaken without first stunning them. Since for meat to be kosher many authorities agree that the animal must be conscious, the move essentially blocks kosher as well as halal slaughter in the Scandinavian country. "This is a serious blow to the Jewish faith and the Jews in Denmark," said Israel's Chief Rabbi, David Lau. In other European Union countries, exemptions for religious reasons have been given for kosher slaughter. However,...

Exclusive: While European Jewish organizations express shock, Roman Giertych accepts his family’s anti-Semitic past, disavows it, and promises positive results by September LONDON – The European Jewish Association, a Brussels-based group, has hired the former leader of a political party that has been accused of anti-Semitism to launch a legal challenge to the shechita ban in Poland, the Times of Israel has learned. Roman Giertych is the former chair of the League of Polish Families, a far-right party that in 2001 and 2005 elections received eight percent of the vote, but later collapsed. While Giertych has never himself been accused...

Israel has summoned the Polish ambassador to Jerusalem to register a formal protest against that nation’s ban against ritual slaughter (shechitah). In a harsh statement condemning the decision of a foreign democratic nation, Israel’s Foreign Ministry said “Israel is disappointed that Poland has chosen to forbid an important religious ritual which has been common practice among millions of Jews since ancient times. The Parliament’s decision to reject a bill allowing kosher slaughter in Poland is totally unacceptable,” the statement read. “Poland’s history is intertwined with the history of the Jewish People. This decision seriously harms the process of restoring Jewish...

The European Jewish Association (EJA) on Monday called on all Jewish organizations throughout the world to put aside their differences and unite all their efforts towards reversing the Polish parliament’s decision to ban kosher slaughter in the country, reported the European Jewish Press (EJP). On Friday, the lower house of the Polish parliament, the Sejm, rejected a government-sponsored bill to enable the continuation of kosher shechita, or slaughter of animals intended for food. Ritual slaughter has been banned in Poland since January 1 after a Constitutional Court deemed it incompatible with animal rights law.“We must unite all our efforts to...

Dutch Jews are beginning to wonder what's coming next after the lower house of the Netherlands parliament voted Tuesday to approve a ban on ritual slaughter of animals for kosher and halal meat. The bill, sponsored by the country's Animal Rights Party, stipulates that livestock must be stunned before slaughter. In Jewish law, meat must by prepared through ritual slaughter before it can be declared kosher. Likewise, Islam requires similar procedures for halal meat but does not prohibit slaughter after stunning. A possible loophole in the new law – which has yet to pass the upper house of the parliament...

Regulations that came into effect in New Zealand over the weekend forbid kosher ritual slaughter (shechita). According to the new regulations, animals must now be unconscious before being slaughtered, invalidating them for kosher slaughter.