By LUCETTE LAGNADO, WALL STREET JOURNAL
When Rabbi Naftali Marrus does his spring cleaning, he doesn’t use a mop. He rolls with the Inferno.
The Inferno is a three-and-a-half-foot-long propane torch Rabbi Marrus uses during the critical days before Passover to scour commercial kitchens catering to observant Jews and obliterate the smallest particles of bread and other leavened foods, which are forbidden during the holiday that commemorates the Jews’ flight from Egypt.
Marching into the kitchen of My Most Favorite Food, a restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Rabbi Marrus runs his finger along stove tops, pokes his head inside the big industrial ovens, examines the coffee maker and inspects walls and floors. They have been soaked in boiling water and scrubbed clean with soap, detergents, degreasers and ammonia.
No matter. With the restaurant’s owners, Doris Schechter and her son-in-law Scott Magram looking on, Rabbi Marrus directs the flames of the Inferno up and down racks of steel rolling trays and deep inside the oven. His assistant will apply the Inferno to the pots and pans. Ms. Schechter takes the drastic cleaning in stride. “To me it is a renewal, you start over again.”
Rabbi Marrus, 6-feet-3-inches tall and built like a football player, handles the Inferno with care. “You have to be respectful to the blowtorch,” he says.
Passover, which starts Monday at sundown and lasts eight days, is the busy season for Rabbi Marrus. As a supervising rabbi for OK Kosher Certification, an agency in Brooklyn, N.Y., he and his colleagues are working 24/6—they don’t work on the Sabbath—to ensure that all restaurants, caterers, cafés, industrial kitchens and food manufacturers that want the OK Kosher for Passover label follow strict Jewish food laws.
But keeping kosher isn’t just for Passover, and it isn’t just for traditional Jewish food. OK gives its kosher blessing to items as varied as Perrier water and Tropicana orange juice.
Getting the kosher seal is a rigorous experience that requires OK’s 300-odd part-time rabbis to travel around inspecting plants where food is produced. They study every ingredient that goes into a product to make sure it conforms with religious law. Only then will they allow it to carry their trademark “K” with a circle around it.
“We like to say God is our silent partner,” remarks Rabbi Chaim Fogelman, an OK veteran.
OK Kosher started in about 1935 as a mom-and-pop shop called Organized Kashrut Laboratories. It’s now a multinational player, with rabbis in China, Japan, India, Belgium and Israel who certify nearly 500,000 products from about 3,000 companies. Its headquarters are still in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. It operates as a nonprofit. Clients pay from $2,000 to tens of thousands of dollars annually.
Kosher dietary laws date back to biblical times. Several basic laws come with hundreds, even thousands of regulations or interpretations. Eating pork and shellfish, for example, is banned, while mixing meat and milk is also taboo. There are also intricate rules on how an animal must be slaughtered to produce kosher meat.
Establishments that serve kosher food, including restaurants, cafés, catering halls and butcher shops, need to have a mashgiach on hand, an on-site supervisor, typically a rabbi, assigned to stand around and watch, guarding against treif or unkosher ingredients that could slip in.
The U.S. kosher market is valued at about $12.5 billion. “The iconic brands of America are overwhelmingly kosher,” says Menachem Lubinsky, President of Lubicom Marketing Consulting. Familiar brands such as Coca-Cola, Snapple, Philadelphia cream cheese, Coors beer and Tootsie Rolls all have products with a kosher label.
“It is astounding when you figure that Jews are less than 2% of the population,” says Sue Fishkoff, author of the book “Kosher Nation.” Many non-Jews believe a kosher product is healthier and safer, she says. “Is it? Possibly the Kosher beef is. But certainly not the cereal or the aluminum foil.”
These days, more than 1,000 agencies world-wide vie with one another to bestow on products an alphabet soup of kosher insignia. These include the ubiquitous k with a circle around it favored by OK; there’s the OU—a U inside a circle—sign used by the Orthodox Union; while the Rabbinical Council of Chicago is known for its cRc in a triangle stamp.
“There is healthy competition, but we do work for a higher cause,” says Rabbi Sholem Fishbane of Chicago’s rabbinic agency. “We try to promote kosher.”
Itchkes Shteibel.
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