Is today's kosher supervision G-d's work or is it simply big business?
The Jerusalem Report has an article on American kashrut agencies muscling in on European turf.
Choice quotes:
According to Lubicom Marketing Consulting, a Brooklyn-based firm that researches the industry, the $8-billion kosher market in the United States has been growing at a 15-percent rate for the last few years. Ironically, most of that growth is not being driven by people who keep kosher. As Lubicom's research shows, the vast majority of kosher consumers buy kosher products because they believe they're safer, healthier or tastier.
"Kosher is hot," quips Rabbi Moshe Elefant, executive rabbinic coordinator of the OU, which is currently giving most of its new certifications outside the United States, especially in the Far East. Dr. Avrom Pollak, president of Star-K, which currently supervises some 200 companies in China, estimates that half of Star-K�'s new certifications are now going abroad. Kashrut certification is so globalized and ecumenicized, in fact, that the OU -- which supervises some 6,000 plants in 70 countries -- is currently certifying a Turkish factory packing kosher Christmas candies. Most of the time, the agencies send supervisors from Israel or the United States, although they occasionally employ local rabbis.…
But Rabbi Eliezer Maarsen, rabbinic administrator of the Orthodox chief rabbinate of Holland, which supervises about 100 Dutch food manufacturers, takes a different tone. "It seems like for them America is not big enough. Now they take what they can get," he protests. "They are coming to Holland, to Belgium, to Luxembourg. To everywhere." Maarsen says the Dutch rabbinate has so far not lost much business, but that competition for new customers is fierce.…
The income generated by kashrut supervision is especially significant to smaller communities. Holland's Maarsen, for example, says money earned from the rabbinate's certification business is funneled back into the 25,000-member Dutch Jewish community to support education and synagogue life. "They need this money," he says.…
"The old principle that goes back to the Hasam Sofer [Europe�s preeminent halakhic authority 200 years ago] that the rabbi was king in his province or city, that nobody entered, not to marry or to slaughter, is over," [Rabbi Maarsen] laments. "They are not dealing with respect these days. That is over."…
[T]he perception of the large American agencies' certification as a kind of global brand may be created by the agencies themselves. "Part of their tactics is to talk negatively about the local rabbinate to convince companies that staying with the local authorities will take them nowhere," says a rabbi who has worked with several of the agencies. Indeed, Rabbi Yosef Tirnauer, who serves the OU as a globetrotting kashrut supervisor, makes it clear … how he views the competition. "Whoever joins us, I tell them, 'Welcome to the club. We're the Mercedes.'" Turning to export manager Cakir, he promises, "If you pack this honey with the OU symbol, the sky is the limit. Catering, hospitals, airplanes. Even jails."
So, is it G-d's work or big business? You decide.
Read it all here.