Government tries to find way out of kosher ban controversy

PM Tusk looking for ways out of kosher ban muddle: photo - PAP/Radek Pietruszka

Minister Michal Boni has been given the task by Donald Tusk after MPs voted to extend the ban last week.

The ruling Civic Platform-led coalition wanted to drop the ban though several members of Donald Tusk's party voted to extend it after party discipline was not demanded on what was a 'vote of conscience' in parliament last Friday.

The ban came into force after Poland's Constitutional Court found that kosher and halal slaughter was incompatible with animal rights legislation.

The government is now consulting lawyers on whether the ban contravenes sections in the Polish Constitution on religious freedoms.

Israel has called the ban “totally unacceptable” though a majority of Poles tell opinion pollsters they support it.

Pawel Sajak, liberal MP from the anti-clerical Palikot Movement said in parliament before the vote extending the ban, that legalising kosher and halal slaughtering, which disallows stunning before the animal is killed, "ensures that a living, conscious being will die in agony”.

The ban pits religious traditions and rights against animal welfare and secular values, and national laws against EU guidelines, which allows the slaughtering method if it is part of well-established cultural and religious practices.

Shochet

Earlier this year our reporter Hagay Hacohen met Rabbi Yehusha Ellis at a chicken farm in Katowice, south west Poland.

Rabbi Ellis is a shochet, a trained Jewish butcher, qualified to slaughter animals as part of the kosher ritual, and he gives a detailed explanation of the slaughtering method.

Jewish groups argue that though the method of slaughtering animals may sound a little gruesome to some, it is much more humane than many of the ways modern factory farming uses to ready meat for the market.

Click on the listen icon to hear the interview with Rabbi Ellis, which was first broadcast as part of our Day in the Life series. (pg)