Pesach Pitfalls

Running a mehadrin Pesach hotel has got to be one of the most complex kashrus challenges out there. It’s up to consumers to do their due diligence as to what is happening in the kitchens, and not just check how well-known and distinguished the rabbanim pictured on the advertisement are.

I’ve personally called up rabbanim to ask what they think of the kashrus standards of the programs they are supposedly participating in, and the most common answer to my query is that they do not eat there. They bring along Pesach food from home and just stay in the hotel for 24 hours or less to deliver their shiurim.

There’s so much happening on the food front of a Pesach program that the range of possible kashrus issues runs the full gamut. The hashgachah team needs to study the entire menu in advance, so they know which dishes are being served when and can ensure that nothing cooking in the vast kitchen isn’t really for the next day of Yom Tov, thus transgressing the halachos of hachanah, or being prepared on Shabbos for Yom Tov. We have some women (often the wives of mashgichim) on the team, so we’re covered when the mashgichim all go to davening.

If the hotel is not open exclusively for Pesach guests, and there is a nonkosher kitchen open at the same time, that’s a definite invitation for trouble. I do not know of one such case where nothing went wrong over Pesach, whether it was an eager-to-please waiter who grabbed the ketchup or mayonnaise from the wrong kitchen, or treif dishes that were found in the Pesach dishwasher.

Some Pesach hotels do not have a well-known hashgachah, but are certified by a single rav hamachshir. A consumer should be able to ask questions about the program’s halachic standards and get clear answers — if the kashrus authority isn’t fully transparent, why would you trust them? Be sure to specifically ask about the dishwashers — the hardest thing to kasher — and how they are planning to kasher them. Are they allowing the caterer to use the hotel’s glassware (which some authorities allow if he doesn’t have enough) and if so, are they washing those (not-specially-kept-for-Pesach) drinking glasses in the same dishwasher as the caterer’s Pesach dishes?

When it comes to food itself, there’s an almost endless list of what can go wrong. There are kosher-for-Pesach macaroni and pizzas today, which can easily be confused with the real thing. There’s cumin, which according to many opinions is kitniyos, but carries a Pesach hechsher from others who say it isn’t. The rav might have told the caterer not to order cumin, so he doesn’t, but hey, he’s ordered shawarma spice — and there’s your cumin, inside.

Hotels like to serve high-end cheeses, but some of those require waiting six hours before eating meat. Our hashgachah prohibits six-hour cheese, considering it a michshol, as meals and snacks and barbeques are served frequently, and people forget what they ate when. So the mashgiach needs to look out for those on the cheese boards, too.

Then there are birthday cakes. There are always a lot of birthdays over Pesach, and of course, people want to celebrate them. Any caterer will bring along plenty of beautiful kosher-for-Pesach birthday cakes to the hotel program. But don’t forget that there are wait staff servicing the customers, and their goal is to provide outstanding service so they can earn generous tips.

We had a situation where a waiter heard that a family was celebrating a birthday. Wanting to impress them, he ran to Walmart and bought birthday candies and confetti and sprinkled them all over their table. Fortunately, the mashgichim in our programs do a walkabout right before the dining room opens for a meal (to check for any milchig silverware set on the fleishig tables or vice versa) and they realized what had happened.

A lot of issues can come up with the employee cafeteria. It’s not realistic to expect the non-Jewish staff to eat Pesach food for eight days. They can’t stomach it, and they can’t live without their tortillas. But the caterer can’t buy chometz for them, because chometz is assur b’hana’ah. The staff will always try to sneak in their food, and the hashgachah has to account for that.

Mashgichim need to be stationed next to the employee cafeteria and lockers. I remember one worker on dishwashing duty who took out a piece of pound cake from his pocket. He was a good worker, and he was very sorry, but you can’t play around with that, and we had to let him go.

An easy indication of a program’s kashrus standard is the ratio of mashgichim to guests. If there are 1,000-plus guests, and six mashgichim, there’s a lot that can go wrong. Consumers might also want to ask their Pesach hotel program how long the mashgichim’s shifts are, because I have heard from mashgichim who are expected to do 18-hour days. At cRc, we usually send 25 mashgichim to a program, so we can keep shifts down to a manageable eight or nine hours and still have eyes everywhere. We make sure the mashgichim can go to minyanim and sit down at some meals, and even have shiurim arranged for them, so we don’t run them ragged and deprive them of a Yom Tov.

I usually go in a couple days before Pesach, gather the hotel staff, and say, “Here are some of the weird stuff we do, and here’s why,” giving the non-Jews some idea about no handshakes between men and ladies, no talking after washing our hands for hamotzi, a little explanation about Pesach commemorating the birth of our nation, and why we don’t eat chometz. To be honest, the hardest thing to explain is actually the amount of food the Orthodox Jews are going to consume (like two or three Thanksgiving meals a day). Non-Jewish hotel guests will nibble at hotel food and eat more at restaurants and shows, but the Orthodox guests are just staying put, and they will eat.

The problems can crop up in so many directions. At one program, a mashgiach walked by and saw the caterer had set up a juice bar. It all looked very nice and fresh and was just fruits, all Pesachdig, and he knew the juicers were all new and toiveled, but then he saw that the non-Jewish staff was juicing grapes. There’s a halachic issue with grape juice squeezed by a gentile.

The high-end hotels offer live cigar rolling. The issue is that the cigars are sealed with a glue that needs to be edible as it’s put directly into the mouth. The simplest way to make this glue is to use a starch (like wheat) and water, which can very likely be chometz. (This concern is primarily for Pesach hotel attendees, as regular cigars that are rolled with this glue are dried in humidors for more than 30 days so the glue then becomes inedible and permitted.) An experienced kashrus authority at the hotel will only allow glue made of fruit pectin or gum arabic.

Another time, I saw a Pesach hotel brochure offering tailoring and shoeshines all Chol Hamoed. Hold on, I thought, professional tailoring services on Chol Hamoed?

Wake Up and Smell the Coffee

I take in a lot of caffeine when I travel, plus we get tons of questions about Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts coffees, so I do a lot of research on coffee. So when I was in the airport in Davao City in the Philippines, I took a look at the coffees on sale, and was very intrigued by a small bottle of coffee with a picture of a cat-like animal on it. It turned out that the animal was not a cat but a civet, a small mammal native to the Philippines. Why was it on a coffee jar? I had to find out.

This is what I discovered: Many years ago, coffee was a commodity only the rich could afford. The story goes that a landowner went to visit one of his poor serfs and was offered a coffee. “What, you have coffee?” he wondered. It turned out to be the most delicious coffee the wealthy man had ever tasted, rich and sweet without the characteristic bitterness, and he pressed the peasant to tell him where he had gotten it.

The poor man was embarrassed, but under pressure, he revealed that coffee bushes grew in the area, and wild civets ate the coffee berries. The berries passed through the civets’ digestive system whole, and the impoverished peasants used to collect them from the waste material. They’d wash them, roast and grind them, and the coffee tasted amazing. It seemed that the civet’s digestive enzymes stripped the berries of their bitterness.

Civet coffee, or kopi luwak, is a premium item sold today, still produced in that same way. I bought the bottle in the airport, and I keep it here sealed in my office. It’s a great starting point for a halachic discussion. Is a kosher item digested with the enzymes of a treif animal still kosher? Well, if a treif fish eats a kosher fish and you find that kosher fish whole in its stomach, you can eat it. But when it comes to the coffee, there are halachic opinions on both sides.

By the way, if you’ve heard of black ivory coffee, which they serve in high-end hotels for $50 a cup, it’s a similar concept, sourced in coffee berries “naturally refined by elephants” — i.e., digested by elephants and collected from their waste, then cleaned, roasted and ground. So yes, generally coffee beans don’t need a special hechsher, but coffee is not always just coffee.

Far East Fallout

A few weeks ago, I found myself setting up a kosher production in what’s now called Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), in Vietnam. We produce a lot of dried fruit there, but mashgichim need to be really careful because we’ve found that in that part of the world, they’ll tell you what they think you want to hear, rather than the truth.

It was summer there, and the city was sweltering hot. Not only were people carrying umbrellas as sun shades, but they were also wearing sweaters. I asked the cab driver about this, and he explained to me that in Vietnam, if you have a suntan, you look like you’re a lower-class person, a peasant who works in the fields. The city dwellers consider themselves to be cut from a better cloth, and therefore take care not to get a suntan, so that they look classier. It’s very different from the USA, where a tan is a sign of health, wealth, and leisure.

The Philippines have this amazing fruit there, called durian. It’s one of the most delicious fruits you’ll ever have, with the inside tasting sweet like custard, but the smell of the fruit is impossible to handle — it smells like rotten eggs. The odor is so bad that there are signs in the city’s hotels and on the buses, “No Durians Allowed.” You can see people sitting on the buses and holding their baskets of fruit out of the window.

(The scene reminds me of when we lived in Eretz Yisrael after our wedding, and hepatitis broke out. There was a remedy that circulated involving placing a pigeon on the patient’s stomach. After Egged hung up posters banning pigeons from their buses, you’d see people traveling on buses, holding pigeons outside the windows.)

Unholy Incense

I’ve always found India a fascinating place. Every rav has learned hilchos Avodah Zarah, but how often is it actually applicable? Over there, it’s relevant as soon as you step off the plane. In fact, you can barely find a corner to daven in, because of the avodah zarah all over the place.

You have to learn their culture in advance, so that you don’t unwittingly fall into something questionable. As soon as I got out of the cab at my hotel, the staff came running over to me. They held a canopy over my head and walked alongside me in welcome, chanting and lighting incense under my nose so I could breathe it in. This is a strange welcome, I thought, followed by, I hope I’m not smelling something prepared for avodah zarah!

I quickly jumped out from under the canopy, feigning an allergy to the fragrance, and I never found out what they were actually doing.

Cows are sacred over India, and all the traffic has to stop whenever a cow wants to cross the road, because they think that cows carry souls. Is that a problem for dairy products? Can one get kosher milk from a cow used for idol worship? Actually, that question doesn’t apply to us practically. The cRc doesn’t certify any milk products in India, because Rav Moshe Feinstein only allowed chalav stam in a place where you don’t have a lot of treif milk, and India has plenty of camel milk. Other hechsherim do certify dairy in India though.

Everyone knows about the tumult with the sheitel hair that cropped up around 20 years ago, when it was discovered that the Indian hair used to make sheitels had, in some cases, first been donated to the gods in the Hindu temples. A few years ago, I heard an interesting postscript.

I was right here in Chicago, about to join a meeting with some cRc rabbis and the Indian owners of a Dunkin Donuts branch, when we heard them chatting animatedly. The scandal they were rehashing was that in the temples of India, where women go to donate their hair to the gods, some of the hair was just being immediately sold to the hair industry and not even offered up in the temple. Of course, there is no way you can pasken sh’eilos based on overheard talk, but I felt that Hashem had put me there to hear that gossip.

Bittersweet

When you see a mashgiach working in a factory you’ll often notice a bar of chocolate peeking out the pocket of his white lab coat. The chocolate is there for a very good reason: It’s the only thing that gets rid of the taste of Bitrex, the most bitter chemical compound currently known to man. And a good mashgiach gets an occasional taste of Bitrex when he tastes the water of the Bitrex-infused water-loop system to make sure it’s “pagum” (distasteful) enough.

Here’s a quick look at the science: Factories have huge water loop systems that go around and around pasteurizers that heat up the products and don’t get changed for months on end. They can be heating dairy and pareve or treif and kosher all in the same week, which is an issue because halachah states that hot bliyos (taste) go through metal walls, infusing the kosher product into nonkosher. The solution is to add a drop of a bitter UK-manufactured chemical called Bitrex into the water loop, which makes it pagum. Once water that produces the steam is pagum, it can’t make anything nonkosher.

So the careful mashgiach adds some Bitrex and asks to taste the water from the loop, to check that it’s pagum enough.

The reactions are usually incredulous. “Are you serious, rabbi? You won’t be able to enjoy anything you eat for a week!”

But if you have that bar of chocolate in your pocket, it’s all okay. And you can even give some out if the other factory workers complain.

Five Things I Wish the Kosher Consumer Knew:

1. Look out for fake non-Jewish kashrus agencies, especially in India and Asia.

These rogue organizations look at websites and copy information, then create their own websites, name-dropping the names of real hechsherim. They sell fake kashrus services, peddling their services to food businesses in India, and some people fall for it. One example someone just posted last month is WRG Kosher in India, offering their services as kashrus supervisors. There is no one Jewish involved; it’s basically a scam. We’ve emailed and tried to get them to stop, but in that part of the world it’s very hard to enforce anything.

2. Triple-washed does not mean bug free.

We have a team who buys triple-washed produce all the time, because the caterers want to get a head start. It is higher quality, but we find tons of bugs. There are some kashrus agencies who are giving a hechsher on triple-washed produce, but if you ask them, they’ll tell you that they “don’t take responsibility for bugs.” The hechsher is just on the product.

3. Eating only dairy doesn’t solve any kashrus problems.

There are 1,500 kashrus organizations that I know of (those are 1,500 Jewish ones, not counting the fakes), but the standards vary greatly. You may hear people say, “I know restaurant XYZ is not a great hechsher, I’m only eating milchig,” but that’s a strange statement. Any restaurant kitchen needs supervision on bishul Yisrael, insects, and ingredients. Dairy has exactly the same halachos in those areas as meat.

Actually, dairy restaurants can even be harder to supervise, because there is usually more salad, meaning more infestation issues, and because it’s very complicated to kasher the factory equipment for high-end cheeses.

4. You can’t always have a beer.

Beer used to be pretty safely kosher, because you can only make beer from four or five ingredients. But craft beer has changed that, playing with different mixes and tastes. We know of a company in Boston that puts 24 pies of pepperoni pizza in the beer, all in the name of craft and hot flavor. Other companies are putting in whey, which is milchig and can be treif. Stick to the regular brands you know are kosher.

5. Whenever there is a shortage of an item, people get creative.

Right with the avian flu killing out chickens, eggs are in shorter supply, and the suppliers are no longer rejecting eggs during the “candling” process where they check for quality. They are selling lower-quality eggs to meet the great demand, which means people are reporting that they find many more blood spots in their eggs. So eggs need to be checked very conscientiously.

Is it good enough?

The most common calls we get are from shoppers who find themselves in an unfamiliar supermarket and can’t find their go-to groceries. They find some packaging with kosher symbols that they don’t recognize, and they call in to say, “I’m in a store and there’s nothing else to buy but this brand — is this hashgachah good?”

In an effort to service these callers, our newly redesigned cRc app includes a hechsher logo scanner. Once the logo is scanned, the user gets the full information about the hechsher: who the rav hamachshir is, where it is based, and our recommendation, if it’s an authority whose standards we have researched and can recommend. (Part of our time is devoted to researching other kashrus authorities, observing how they do things, and often working together to raise standards.)

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1055)