In the July 16, 1956 correspondence on his Senate letterhead pictured in this column, then-Senator John F. Kennedy, writing to the Union of Orthodox Rabbis regarding a shechitah bill then pending before the Senate, essentially ducks the issue, noting that further study is required with respect to the “important questions involved:”
This will acknowledge and thank you for your recent wire, signed by Rabbi El Silver and Rabbi M. Rosen, Members of the Presidium, and Rabbi Meyer Cohen, Director, expressing opposition to S. 1636, which would regulate methods of slaughtering livestock and poultry.The Senate Agricultural Committee has now indicated that there are some important questions involved here which require further study and has recommended the establishment of an advisory committee to examine the matter. It will be that committee’s task to smooth out the difficulties and recommend a course of action that will be acceptable to all parties.
On July 6, 1955, a bill regulating the slaughter of livestock and poultry was introduced by Senator Hubert H. Humphrey in the Senate (S. 1636) and Rep. Martha Griffiths in the House of Representatives (H.R. 6099), which would require slaughterhouses to render animals and poultry unconscious and insensitive to pain before slaughter, which is clearly contrary to halacha. While the original bill did exempt individuals duly authorized by a rabbi to serve as ritual slaughterers, many Orthodox Jewish leaders – including the OU, as our letter here shows – were determinedly opposed to the bill because of its revolting implication that shechitah is inhumane (thus necessitating an exception to the law).
Senator Humphrey, a friend to the Jewish community and always sensitive and responsive to its needs, led the successful effort to amend his own bill so as to specifically recognize Jewish ritual slaughter as humane. This amendment was indeed reflected in the Humane Methods of Livestock Slaughter Act, ultimately signed into law by President Eisenhower on August 27, 1958, which defined shechitah as:
[S]laughtering in accordance with the ritual requirements of the Jewish faith or any other religious faith that prescribes a method of slaughter whereby the animal suffers loss of consciousness by anemia of the brain caused by the simultaneous and instantaneous severance of the carotid arteries with a sharp instrument.
In 1973, Jewish atheist Henry Mark Holzberg filed suit in New York federal court challenging the constitutionality of the law, alleging that it violated the First Amendment through its governmental recognition of a religious preference. (In an interesting sidelight, one of the defendants in that suit, originally identified as “John Doe,” turned out to be Rav Joseph Soloveitchik.] In April 1974 the court essentially threw the case out, ruling that Congress had “considered ample and persuasive evidence to the effect that the Jewish ritual method of slaughter, and the handling preparatory to such slaughter, was a humane method” and that Congress had not created any exception to a general rule.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe’s senior Chabad emissary, Rabbi Hershel Fogelman, had corresponded with JFK in the early 1950s regarding the growing movement to ban shechitah in the United States. Despite Kennedy’s “punt” on the issue in our letter, Rabbi Fogelman reported that JFK responded with strong support for Jewish ritual slaughter and with a promise that shechitah would never be prohibited. Rabbi Fogelman, who was later privy to many Oval Office meetings with President Kennedy, said he always found the president responsive and cooperative on Jewish issues.
Jewish Democrats did not entirely trust the son of Joseph Kennedy, a man broadly considered to be both anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi. Nonetheless, in New York, which JFK carried by only 384,000 votes, Jewish precincts gave Kennedy an 800,000-vote plurality; some 80 percent of the Jewish vote went to JFK, a higher percentage than he earned from his fellow Catholics. In a June 1, 1961 meeting with Jewish leaders in New York, Kennedy acknowledged to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion that “I was elected by Jews.”
