Zoologist-turned-rabbi Dr. Yisrael Meir Levinger stands up for shechitah

Photos: Elchanan Kotler

A collection of taxidermized animals, pictures of kashrus expeditions to exotic locations, perhaps a shechitah knife collection. That’s what you’d expect to find in the home of the world’s only former chief rabbi who is also a vet, zoologist, pharmacologist, chemist, head of a kashrus organization, decades-long international defender of shechitah, and prolific author of seforim.

Instead, the only thing distinguishing the modest Bayit Vegan apartment of Rabbi Yisrael Meir Levinger from its neighbors is a mounted piranha, memento of a trip to South America. It sits with two vicious rows of teeth permanently bared and unblinking wicked yellow and black eyes, looking as if it’s about to attack somewhere in the Amazon.

But look further along the neat shelves to understand why Rabbi Levinger is a trailblazer. Among the rows of classical seforim — what any rav would have in his bookcase — is another shelf. Here are the many seforim he has authored, on topics ranging from shechitah and treifos to chullin to kashrus — most of them with pictures and illustrations, a genre popular today, but which Rabbi Levinger pioneered.

For the last 50 years, wherever shechitah has been attacked, it’s Rabbi Levinger who has been called on to use his scientific expertise to defend it. From fish parasites to the recent Braekel chicken debate, halachic controversies end up at the door of this mesorah expert. His is the type of encyclopedic knowledge picked up along an unusual route — on a journey from a zoologist to a rav.

Yisrael Meir Levinger was born into a German-speaking family in a German-speaking neighborhood — yet quite far from Germany. The Rechavia of the 1930s echoed with the “Danke schon, bitte schon” of its German Jewish immigrants, and the Levinger home, in nearby Shaarei Chesed, was part of that world.

“My family arrived in Yerushalayim on Erev Pesach 1933 from Munich,” says Rabbi Levinger. “Already in 1924 or 1925 my grandfather was attacked by anti-Semitic thugs in Bavaria who shouted ‘Ostjude, gein nach Polen.’ So on the day Hitler came to power, my mother said, “That’s it — we’re leaving.”

Yisrael Meir’s father, a doctor, wanted to educate his children in the German tradition. “There wasn’t a chareidi school with proper secular studies in Yerushalayim then, only yeshivos or secular schools,” says Rabbi Levinger, who was just a baby at the time. “So the following year, my father became one of the founders of Chorev, a high school named after Rav Hirsch’s major work.”

They may have grown up in Jerusalem, but the Levinger children’s education was Frankfurt all over. One brother became a professor at Tel Aviv University; one sister, a microbiologist; another sister worked at the National Library. In normal times, Yisrael Meir might have followed suit, but late 1940’s Palestine wasn’t normal — and Yisrael Meir was a rebel. “My father wanted me to become a doctor like him, but I was a revolutionary,” he admits.

As a 14-year-old when Israel’s War of Independence broke out in 1948, Yisrael Meir left school to help the cause. Too young to sign up for the nascent army, he volunteered as a counselor in a Sephardic orphanage. At the end of the war, he went to yeshivah in Beer Yaakov and Kfar Haroeh — but not for long. “You have to understand that those times were different. There was tremendous excitement of building a new country. I wanted to take part in that.”

In those early days, today’s sharp dividing lines over attitudes to army service and the state hadn’t yet been drawn. Rabbi Levinger shares a memory to illustrate this fact: “On the day the UN declared the partition of Palestine in 1947, I came home from Chorev as usual,” he says. “I told my father that we’d said Tachanun. Then in came someone else, and said that the gaon Rav Charlap of Shaarei Chesed had said Hallel.”

Yisrael Meir wasn’t the only Levinger with revolutionary blood. His brother, one year younger, was the late Rabbi Moshe Levinger a”h, famed as the leader of the settlement movement in Judea and Samaria and the founder of the renewed Jewish community in Chevron. What did their parents think of their chalutznik activities? “My father was very proud of us,” remembers Rabbi Levinger. “He said that we have to build the land.”

In 1950, the young Israeli-Yekkeh was drafted into the army, into a religious unit in the Nachal Brigade, which combined agriculture with military service. This unit founded Kibbutz Sha’alvim near what is now Modiin — one of a handful of religious kibbutzim in the country. It was part of the Poalei Agudas Yisrael movement which combined Agudah affiliations with a program of practical land settlement.

It was on Sha’alvim that two strands in young Yisrael Meir’s life — animals and Torah — began to converge, creating the unique blend that came to be Rabbi Levinger. “I went to work in the refet — the cow shed,” he says. “I loved the animals, and got the idea to become a veterinarian. At the same time, I wanted to really understand the halachos of treifos. So I cut up a lamb to understand exactly what was what. Today there are other ways to learn, but that’s what we did then.”

Thus began an unusual career trajectory: cow barn to rabbanus, zoology to treifos — a sort of Torah im derech eretz in reverse.

But in 1950s Israel, there was simply nowhere to train as a vet; it was at least 15 years before the first program was established. And so, having made up his missed high school bagrut while working on the farm, Yisrael Meir headed to Zurich to study in 1955. “I only spoke bad German from home,” Rabbi Levinger recalls. “I had to improve it for my studies. At the same time I got involved in working with the Agudah jugend — the youth division of the local Agudas Yisrael.”

It was in Zurich’s small Jewish community that Yisrael Meir met his wife Dora, nee Sternbuch. “My aunt was Recha Sternbuch, the famous Holocaust rescue activist,” Mrs. Levinger explains. That made Rabbi Levinger a relative of Rav Moshe Sternbuch, which later lead to collaboration between the two on questions involving shechitah and more.

Completing his studies in Switzerland, which had banned shechitah at the end of the 19th century, turned the newly qualified vet’s thoughts to the subject. Determined to prove the morality of shechitah, he wrote his doctorate —  overseen by two non-Jewish professors — on the effect of shechitah on animals’ nervous systems.

The Levingers prepared to head back to Israel, but not before the newly minted Dr. Levinger published a groundbreaking work called Madrich LeHilchos Treifos. It contained diagrams and pictures of all the animal parts that contain possible treifos. Today’s seforim are dotted with computer-generated images of everything from the Mishkan to Kiddush Hachodesh, but back then, the sefer’s style was so groundbreaking that rabbanim refused to give it a haskamah.

Being ahead of your time, Rabbi Levinger discovered, isn’t always easy.

In a literal version of the elevator pitch, I had ten seconds to introduce myself to Rabbi Levinger as we moved between floors in the Antwerp Old Town Hilton a few weeks ago, at the Conference of European Rabbis. My wife’s grandfather, Mr. David Rothschild of Zurich, was head of the Swiss Board of Deputies and is a cousin of Rabbi Levinger. He had told me that his relative’s unusual range of knowledge and front line role in the shechitah battle was a story worth telling. It was this shechitah expertise that had brought Rabbi Levinger to Antwerp for the CER. The location of this large semiannual meetup was no coincidence, as Belgium recently became the first country to bow to the animal rights movement and ban shechitah since the Nazi era.

Channeling his credibility as a veterinarian, Rabbi Levinger has been battling for decades to demonstrate the morality of shechitah. And he’s unequivocal about it: He’s proven that shechitah is the most humane way to slaughter animals.

“As part of my research, I did an EEG on animals to monitor brain activity during the shechitah process,” explains Rabbi Levinger. “It showed that the animals registered no change in brain activity at all. That’s because the knife is so sharp that it cuts painlessly, and the animal loses consciousness in less than one and a half seconds after shechitah due to blood loss.

“And people claim that animals are scared of shechitah,” he adds. “But I once showed a bloody knife to some cows and they didn’t react — one even licked the blood.”

In over half a century in the field, Rabbi Levinger has helped defeat anti-shechitah legislation in a number of countries, including Ireland and Holland. “Whenever I’m able to present the facts to experts, they are convinced that this is far more humane than shooting the animal in the head, where in many cases, the animal lives after being shot and suffers a lot of pain. In fact,” says Rabbi Levinger, “a leading professor of zoology told me that if he had to be executed, he’d want it to be done by shechitah.”

But the successful push to ban shechitah in Belgium was spearheaded by animal-rights organizations that are more interested in ideology than hard scientific facts. These groups resort to crude propaganda, showing shechitah in all its gory detail, even though all they can prove is that it’s not aesthetic.

The head of an animal-rights group in Basel was a case in point, says Rabbi Levinger. “I convinced him that shechitah wasn’t painful, but they threw him out of the organization for being too open to my point of view.”

Another example was what happened when the animal-rights organization PETA snuck a hidden camera into the Agriprocessors slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, which was managed by Shalom Mordechai Rubashkin. In the early stages of the Rubashkin saga, after having witnessed the bloody facts of slaughter close-up together with a viral video, they accused Agriprocessors of cruelty to animals during the shechitah process. Rabbi Levinger once again attempted to speak up for shechitah, and when a leading US slaughter expert said that the plant was up to standard, the group changed tactics: They simply said that they’d convince supermarkets not to buy the meat.

Given the increased sway of animal- rights groups over public discourse, as evidenced in Belgium, what can be done to fight back?

“One thing I’ve suggested is that in Europe they start to do nikkur again,” Rabbi Levinger says, offering a partial halachic Band-Aid to a complicated problem. “For a long time in England, for example, they were selling the hindquarters of the animal to non-Jews because of the ban on nikkur instituted decades ago. Because animal-rights groups have agitated for labeling slaughtered meat that is sold on the general market to enable a boycott, they can make shechitah uneconomical. Reinstituting nikkur so that we can eat the hindquarters would remove some of that leverage.”

But as Rabbi Levinger himself points out, changing course on nikkur isn’t simple. It used to be done by Ashkenazim in Israel until 1948. But the arrival of the Hungarian Jews ended that practice, and today it’s the province of Sephardim, led prominently by Rav Shlomo Machpud of Bnei Brak. Meat imported into Israel today excludes the hindquarters.

Although Rabbi Levinger has been fighting running battles with the animal- rights movement for the last 50 years, he doesn’t believe that they’re wrong on everything. Last year he signed a letter together with leading members of Israel’s Chief Rabbinate council protesting the inhumane conditions by which animals are shipped to Israel, after an exposי by an Australian animal-rights organization.

“Unless overcrowding causes treifos problems, in halachah the animal’s transport conditions don’t affect the shechitah,” he says. “But we should still be concerned with what happens before because of tzaar baalei chayim.”

In other words, animals may not have rights, but there is a right way to treat them.

His close involvement with the world of kashrus was all in the future when the Levingers returned to Israel in the 1960s and Dr. Levinger took a job as government veterinarian in the north of Israel, based in the area around Tzfas and Teveria. But it wasn’t long until he transferred to Bnei Brak, to work in Bar Ilan University’s zoology department.

Having visions of Rabbi Levinger handling monkeys and capturing snakes, I try probing more about that period. In particular, after working for so many years with animals, what is Rabbi Levinger’s favorite? The answer comes as a surprise: “I love nature and I still love animals, but today I view them more as objects.” That seemingly clinical attitude is belied by a picture taken recently of Rabbi Levinger on a farm in Holland. On a mission to examine some aspects of treifos, he was snapped stroking the cows — perhaps reliving his first experience in Sha’alvim.

But even as Dr. Levinger worked with animals as a researcher, his career was tending more and more in the direction of halachah.

“I went to Moshe Dayan, who was then agriculture minister, to obtain funding to research problems of treifos in cattle. His response was, “How much damage does this cause on average?”

But being an expert in the medical aspects of shechitah didn’t mean that the vet knew how to handle a shechitah knife himself. “I decided to learn shechitah but I had to learn from the Sephardim, because the Ashkenazi shochtim viewed me as pasul because I was too much of a scientist.”

Along with the practical elements of kashrus, Rabbi Levinger also made it his mandate to master the mesorah aspect. “I traveled around Israel taking to Yemenite, Moroccan, and Tunisian chachamim, to find out which species of chickens and other animals they had a mesorah for.”

Back in the 1960s, Rabbi Levinger’s interest in chicken mesorah was a personal quest, but just two years ago, it became a hot topic as a halachic controversy broke out over the Braekel chicken. Kashrus is determined not just by split hooves and cud-chewing, but also by mesorah. Without a tradition, we simply don’t eat an animal no matter how kosher it looks. The controversy started when some claimed that the chickens that we eat, which are engineered to become virtual flesh and egg factories, bear no resemblance to the traditional Yiddishe chicken. These claimants put forward what they claimed was the real mesorah chicken: A lean fowl originating in Belgium, known as the Braekel chicken.

At this point, Rav Moshe Sternbuch reached out to Rabbi Levinger, his cousin by marriage. Rabbi Levinger’s opinion was clear: “Our birds are good; the Braekel is definitely not the mesorah.”

All of this investigation of the animal, fish and plant world meant a lot of traveling. And while Rabbi Levinger doesn’t have many exotic mementos, he’s constantly remembering little things. “I traveled to Holland in 1957,” he recalls, “and no one there wanted to speak German after the war. But in a remote place I met a woman with a Magen David on her sleeve, and suddenly she blurted out “Mamme loshen ret ihr nisht?” The same oddity happened in Russia decades later. “It was the day that Gorbachev was chosen, and I was trying to find someone to speak English to, without success. Suddenly in Communist Russia someone asked me the same question.”

By the early 1970s, the transformation from the barn to the rabbinate was almost complete. “I was teaching maseches Chullin in various yeshivos,” remembers Rabbi Levinger, “and I was working on projects such as making a Shabbos telephone for emergency use and consulting Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, when someone asked me why I didn’t have semichah. All through my years in university I’d always learned, so I decided to go in that direction.”

But even Rabbi Levinger didn’t dream that the rabbinate would take him full circle, back to the Munich his parents had fled.

Like Yaakov Avinu who went down to Egypt temporarily, the Levingers went to Cologne, Germany as guests just for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur of 1976. In the end, Rabbi Levinger notes with irony, “We ended up staying until 1980.”

For the Israeli born-and-bred Rabbi Levinger, living in Germany only three decades after the Holocaust was not especially emotionally wrenching, but how did his parents react to it? “My parents saw that there was a need to save Jews from intermarriage — they had no problem with it. It wasn’t about them.”

Teaching Torah and encouraging Jews to move to Israel were Rabbi Levinger’s two priorities, and the community responded to their rabbi’s commitment. In Cologne, the Levingers were visited by Rav Yitzchak Kolitz, chief rabbi of Jerusalem, who told Rabbi Levinger he’d never seen a rabbi whose telephone rang so much.

But it was in Basel, Switzerland — the country that had hosted him as a student — that he found his rabbinical niche, from 1980 until 2002. And although Mrs. Levinger hadn’t wanted to become a rebbetzin, she quickly won a place in the hearts of the congregants. “When we left Basel,” says Rabbi Levinger, “they told us that they can let the rabbi go, but not his wife!”

During those years as chief rabbi of Basel, Rabbi Levinger’s output of new seforim in all areas of the Torah picked up. In 1994, he published his landmark Maor L’maseches Chullin, which soon found its way into yeshivos and kollelim all over the world. As a pictorial aide to learning the highly technical — and fact-based — maseches Chullin, it broke new ground once again.

And he didn’t stop there. Although his attempts to create a pan-European kashrus standard for the CER failed, immersion in the finer details of modern kashrus led to another area of expertise: the chemistry of food ingredients, and a four-volume encyclopedia of kashrus. He also founded Badatz Maor Hakashrut, which certifies a range of kosher products including kosher oils and other industrial ingredients, European dairy products, vitamins and supplements.

As more and more of his works come off the shelf, I ask Rabbi Levinger what drives him in finding the next project. “I have no particular line,” he answers. “I’ll go into any area. I’m now giving shiurim to people in Germany via WhatsApp. But so many areas of the Gemara and halachah are practical. And what I’m working on now is a new project,” he says, holding a first volume, “to use photos to explain what all the animals, plants, and biology in Shas are referring to.”

The collection of seforim authored by this veterinarian-turned-rabbi would do any professor proud. But ironically enough, he credits his astounding output to his move away from academia.

“Bar Ilan University wanted to give me a professorship. But I left Bar Ilan when I realized that we wanted two different things. What I wanted to focus on wasn’t scientific enough for them. They wanted to win Nobel prizes. For me, the science was a gateway to Torah.”

And here, in Rabbi Levinger’s soft-spoken way, is the explanation for the unusual transformation from zoologist to rav.

“At the end of the day, all I really wanted was to understand Torah.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 770)