Some college students use their winter break between terms to relax, fly to warm climates and in general recover from the academic burdens of the fall semester. Others study how to slaughter chickens according to kosher law.
A partnership between OU Kosher and its OU Kosher Coming program – which sends the Orthodox Union’s kashrut experts far and wide to provide kosher education to all levels of students – and the OU’s Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus (JLIC) program brought a week of intensive kosher learning to the Princeton University campus for a week beginning New Year’s Day. Rabbi David Wolkenfeld, the JLIC rabbi at Princeton, played host to Rabbi Chaim Loike, OU Kosher’s bird expert and a skilled shochet.
JLIC, found on 15 major campuses in the United States and Canada, has a young rabbi and his wife, known as Torah Educators, provide the learning and social atmosphere of the yeshiva to Orthodox students who have chosen to attend secular universities. (Rabbi Wolkenfeld is joined at Princeton by his wife, Sara.)
Students came from Princeton, Rutgers, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania, all of which are JLIC campuses; Cornell also sent its JLIC rabbi, Ami Silver, and the campus mashgiach. Other students came from Columbia and Wellesley and were joined by an Israeli visiting in America before his army service.
The national JLIC office and the Alumni Venture Fund of the Bronfman Youth Fellowship in Israel helped subsidize the program, which enabled Rabbi Wolkenfeld to charge a moderate tuition of $350, which included the cost of the source books, shechita knives and sharpening stones for each participant, a supply of birds, both exotic and common, and food for the eight days of the program.
The program came about because of a conversation several months previously between William Herlands, a Princeton senior and Rabbi Wolkenfeld, in which Herlands asked Rabbi Wolkenfeld to help him learn shechita.
“William may live abroad next year, in a location without a regular supply of kosher meat, and so being proficient in shechita would be a way for him to ensure access to meat wherever he ends up after graduation,” Rabbi Wolkenfeld explained.
“I was eager to help William find a way to study shechita since I too had an interest in learning. Unlike William, I have no plans of living abroad, but I am interested in ways to take greater responsibility for the food I eat. The self-sufficiency inherent in being able to ritually slaughter one’s own meat is also very appealing to me. We buy a lot of the fruits and vegetables for our family at farmers’ markets where we know just how and where the food was grown. Shechita is a way to have that same concern and consciousness when eating meat.”
As part of the OU extended family, Rabbi Wolkenfeld made inquiries and came up with the name of Rabbi Loike who, he learned, is an OU Kosher rabbinic coordinator with a specialty in birds, as well as a teacher of shechita at Yeshiva University. In addition, Rabbi Loike travels far and wide in the OU Kosher Coming program and other educational initiatives of OU Kosher and fascinates audiences of all ages while he lectures on the feathered friends he brings with him.
“It soon became clear, however, that it was not realistic to expect that all of the theory and practice of shechita could be taught and learned in one week,” Rabbi Wolkenfeld said. “Rabbi Loike and I came up with an alternative curriculum that would introduce students to the study of shechita, while also including lectures and observations on “halachic ornithology.”
“Halachic ornithology,” Rabbi Wolkenfeld explained, “is the study of birds for the purposes of determining their halachic status. Since birds can only be eaten with a mesorah that they are kosher, a lot of scholarship has been devoted to authenticating claims that a given species has been eaten by Jewish communities, and also determining which sub-species are included in a mesorah to eat a certain kind of bird.”
Setting up the program was easy, with the two rabbis putting together a curriculum. Rabbi Wolkenfeld then reached out to Rabbi Eliyahu Safran, vice president of communications and marketing for OU Kosher, who coordinates educational programs, to arrange for Rabbi Loike’s services. Rabbi Menachem Genack, CEO of OU Kosher, approved the arrangement, which included Rabbi Loike supervising factories in the vicinity of Princeton that are his regular accounts.
“We have been gratified to have our OU Kosher experts visit with many of the JLIC campuses including Boston University [formerly in the program], Brandeis, Rutgers, the University of Pennsylvania and others as part of our ongoing OU Kosher Coming educational programs,” said Rabbi Safran.
