The Proposed Dutch Ban On Shechita

Last week the lower house of the Dutch Parliament voted by an overwhelming majority to ban the ritual slaughter of animals on the grounds of perceived cruelty, and if the ban is endorsed by the upper house and becomes law, Holland's Jewish and Muslim community's will be disadvantaged.

I must confess that the thought of killing and consuming animals fills me with revulsion - and that goes for slaughter methods of any kind.  It's the reason I became a vegetarian at an early age - yes, I did have to hide under the vegetables the meat my mother resolutely persisted on serving me ...

(Please, no attempts to make me into a carnivore; I'll never change!)

A particularly interesting article on the proposed ban has come my way, courtesy of reader Shirlee.  It concludes:

'“[Tom Eijsbouts, professor of law at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Leiden] views the ritual-slaughter ban as a misguided attempt by the Dutch public to deal with its discomfort over the mass production of animals. “It seems to me that the bad feelings have been diverted to a non-essential aesthetic issue of slaughter without stunning,” he says. And the Netherlands is not alone; Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg, and Switzerland have banned ritual slaughter, too.

Marcus Butchers, the only kosher butcher shop in Amsterdam, is located in the south of the city. It’s a stone’s throw from the house on Merwedeplein where Anne Frank and her family hid. The store’s manager, Luuk Koole, hopes that the ban won’t pass the senate and become law. If it does, he says he’ll have no choice but to start importing meat. “I’m not so afraid for business,” he says, “but our prices will go up if we have to import.”

A customer, Rabbi Chaim Rodrigues Pereira, was buying kosher sausage and veal for Shabbat. “I don’t think it’s anti-Semitism,” he says of the ban. (He chalks it up to a modern emphasis on animal welfare, which he supports.) “But if they tell us we may not slaughter kosher, they know we’ll go to Belgium, where they’ll have to slaughter more. They want civility in Holland but they don’t care if they do it in Belgium or France.”

If there is an upside to the slaughter saga, it’s that opposition to the ban has brought the Jewish and Muslim communities closer together. “Working together may be a big word, but we are on the same side,” says Ronnie Eisenmann. “In a secular society, the Jewish community has more in common with Muslims than the Dutch—family, special education, circumcision, ritual slaughter. We’re both more conservative.”'

Read the entire article here: http://www.tabletmag.com/life-and-religion/71658/unkosher-2/