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An amended Conservative Jewish Passover policy taps into the booming gluten-free market
(JTA) — Ahead of Passover 2020 — as life worldwide ground to an abrupt halt in the face of a rapidly spreading pandemic and people faced the specter of empty grocery shelves, or staying confined at home — a range of rabbis tried to make it a little easier to observe the holiday.
Long lists of foods and newly lenient guidelines from Jewish organizations circulated among people who keep kosher for Passover, explaining which foods they could purchase and eat on the holiday, given the year’s extraordinary circumstances. The message — sometimes explicit, sometimes implied — was that these special permissions applied only temporarily.
Now, one rule instituted as a COVID provision by the Conservative movement is becoming permanent: Before Passover begins, Jews may buy certified kosher products that have kosher-for-Passover ingredients and are certified gluten-free and oat-free — even if they aren’t explicitly certified kosher for Passover.
When it first appeared in 2020, that rule was written in a way that suggested it was an emergency measure, using the words “when the situation demands.” This year, that four-word phrase has been removed from the Rabbinical Assembly’s Passover guide, and the guidance has moved from a separate section into the main list of allowable products.
The edit reflects how some shifts in Jewish practice that first appeared at the outset of the pandemic, as stopgap measures, have since been normalized. It also allows — for at least a narrow set of Jews who observe Jewish ritual in accordance with the Conservative movement’s dictates — more robust and potentially less expensive options for keeping kosher during Passover.
Rabbi Aaron Alexander, chair of the Kashrut Subcommittee on the Conservative movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, which issues the movement’s Jewish legal rulings, said the change does not reflect a shift in the movement’s approach to Jewish law, known as halacha. Instead, he said, it reflects confidence that the Food and Drug Administration’s strict rules about how products can be labeled can be trusted when it comes to Passover observance.
“It’s not a significant change in how we understand halacha in general and how we understand the general Passover laws,” Alexander said. “It’s always been the case that there are products you can buy without a KP [symbol] before Passover, when you can be pretty sure that there’s no chametz and that any accidental admixture would be minimal.”
The requirement for foods to be certified gluten-free and oat-free, Alexander said, is “an extra line of defense” for people buying products before Passover that are not explicitly labeled kosher for Passover.
The policy shift opens new doors to kosher-keeping Jews: Rather than seeking out specialty items with Passover kosher certification, often carried only in kosher supermarkets and in major markets, they can observe Passover by taking advantage of the increasing number of products that are labeled kosher, gluten-free and oat-free, as long as the ingredients accord with Passover laws.
The gluten-free marketplace is estimated at $6 billion a year in the United States and is growing by an estimated 10% each year, according to industry trend reports. The marketplace serves people with celiac disease — whose incidence is rising — as well as people who seek to reduce or eliminate their gluten intake for perceived health reasons.
Some people with celiac disease say they look forward to Passover because more products will hit shelves that they can count on to be free of gluten. Now, Jews who follow the Conservative movement’s guidance can benefit from some of the wide array of gluten-free foods that are already available.
On Passover, five types of grain are prohibited (except for when they are used to make matzah): wheat, spelt, barley, oat and rye. By purchasing products that are certified gluten-free and oat-free, consumers can avoid buying food that contain those five ingredients.
“In an effort to definitively alert consumers to the presence of wheat gluten in packaged foods, the FDA mandates that any product including the words ‘gluten-free,’ ‘no gluten,’ ‘free of gluten,’ or ‘without gluten’ must contain less than 20 parts per million of glutinous wheat, spelt, barley, or rye,” a footnote to the guide states. “This eliminates the possibility of a gluten-free packaged food containing 4 of the 5 hametz-derived grains in any quantity that would be viable according to Jewish law.”
Alexander emphasized that the gluten-free and oat-free guidance should be seen as “a good way to figure out whether or not the products you’re getting before Passover could be problematic.” He cautioned that looking at the rest of the ingredients is crucial: Some certified gluten-free products, for example, could still be prohibited for Passover because they contain yeast.
Sarah Chandler, an ordained Hebrew priestess and Jewish educator who used to run a pickle business, already bought food with gluten-free labels during her pre-Passover shopping.
“It’s very practical, and it’s also consistent with other levels of kashrut,” Chandler told JTA regarding her pre-Passover shopping. “The fact that you and I can go to a grocery store and buy eggs — you don’t need a kosher symbol on it. We just know that it’s eggs. We’re not worried that the egg is from a bird of prey and not kosher. We can just assume that [if] it says ‘chicken eggs,’ they’re chicken eggs.”
She added, using a Hebrew term for kosher certification, “We don’t need a hechsher on it. The hechscher just means a certain level of supervision.”
Chandler is a vegetarian and eats a variety of nut butters, which are often expensive. Recently, she bought a jar of gluten-free cashew butter that was on sale for $6 instead of its regular price $12. (A jar of almond butter by a kosher brand marketed for Passover can run around $18.) Because it’s still unopened and the ingredients are kosher for Passover, she plans to eat it during the holiday.
Kosher-keeping Jews with gluten intolerance and celiac disease have especially found a lifeline in the growing marketplace of gluten-free food.
Lisa Goldman, also known as the “Gluten Free Jewish Momma,” is an Orlando-based advocate for the gluten intolerant on behalf of her now-grown daughter, who was diagnosed with celiac disease in 2012.
“My daughter was crying over not being able to have matzah balls because matzah [is] very high in wheat,” Goldman recalled. “So it was so exciting when all of the Jewish brands started to come out with a gluten-free version of many of their products.”
By the Way Bakery, a kosher, gluten-free and dairy-free bakery in New York City founded in 2011 by Helene Godin, may be a destination where Jewish shoppers who abide by the Conservative ruling could get food for the holiday. It is offering multiple Passover items this year, though the menu isn’t certified kosher for Passover.
By the Way Bakery is certified kosher, and its individual products that are sold in Whole Foods are in the process of being certified gluten-free.
“I’m really careful with the word ‘certified,’” Godin told JTA. “We are not certified with respect to Passover. I can tell you what is in [our products]. We’re very transparent. If you go to our website and you go to the FAQ section, there’s a link to our ingredient summary. And we list everything that’s in every product.”
Some of the items on this year’s Passover menu include an orange almond cake that Godin calls “the little black dress of desserts” because it goes with everything, and a chocolate truffle torte. By the Way Bakery’s cakes and cookies are made with wheat flour alternatives, many of which fall into the category of kitniyot, or foods such as legumes, corn, and rice that some Jews, including many Ashkenazim, avoid eating on Passover. Sephardic Jews traditionally eat kitniyot on the holiday and the Conservative Movement began permitting the consumption of kitniyot during Passover in 2016.
“There are people who say, ‘You’re not kosher enough,’” Godin said. “And there are people who say, ‘Oh, I’ll eat that.’”
Another popular gluten-free kosher bakery, Modern Bread and Bagel, is offering non-kitniyot foods for Passover. Like By the Way Bakery, Modern Bread and Bagel is not certified kosher for Passover, but all of its kitchen’s ingredients are kosher for Passover.
Godin says her company gains new customers every Passover, but this year has been an especially busy time. The number of orders for the orange almond cake, which has not been on the menu in several years, was three or four times larger than what she expected.
“Our projections were that we would be up 20% over last year. And we’ve well exceeded that,” she said. “Post-COVID, people just want to celebrate and get together.”
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In its first detailed response to ‘NAZA’ documentary, IDF claims ‘fundamental errors’
(JTA) — The IDF on Thursday issued its first detailed response to “NAZA” after viewing the full documentary alleging Israeli forces knowingly killed large numbers of civilians in the Gaza war, accusing the filmmakers of making fundamental errors about how civilian-casualty estimates, strike approvals and intelligence tools were used.
“The film’s narrative is based on substantial factual errors stemming from a misrepresented and manipulative depiction of reality,” the IDF said in a statement accompanying its findings. The film “presents a distorted, misleading and disingenuous picture of the IDF’s target planning and striking process,” the military said, arguing that it conflates preliminary intelligence work with the later operational and legal process used to decide whether and how a target can be struck.
The filmmakers, who are Israeli, have previously defended the film’s reporting, saying the identities of its anonymous sources and the cases they described were verified and that editors at the Guardian, which produced the film, had access to the underlying material.
The 10-page response came after an IDF representative attended a screening of “NAZA,” directed by filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, in Bologna, Italy, allowing the military to assess the full film for the first time. The army had previously rejected the documentary’s allegations based on excerpts and publicly available material, saying at the time that the filmmakers had not provided it with a copy despite a request to do so.
The film is based on interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers, most of them intelligence personnel, who describe their roles in surveillance, target selection and strikes in Gaza. NAZA is the Hebrew acronym for collateral damage. The film, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival last month, argues that the military accepted high civilian casualty estimates, relied heavily on AI tools to generate targets and weakened safeguards governing strikes.
The IDF in its response Thursday rejected one of the documentary’s most prominent claims, that a strike had been approved despite an estimated civilian death toll of about 500. The military said it had “never planned, approved or carried out” a strike in which 500 civilians, or “anything close to that number,” were expected to be killed.
The IDF also rejected the film’s claim that junior Hamas operatives could be approved for targeting with up to 20 expected civilian casualties, and that senior commanders could be targered with as many as 200. It said the film had confused thresholds requiring approval from more senior commanders, who could then reject the operation, with permission to kill a fixed number of civilians. The military said that no 200-casualty approval threshold had ever existed and that actual thresholds were “much lower,” without specifying what the thresholds were.
The IDF did acknowledge that several incidents involving civilian deaths near humanitarian aid distribution sites prompted operational reviews, changes to instructions and other measures in those areas. However, it disputed testimony that soldiers fired indiscriminately at civilians near the sites and said troops were permitted to fire only at militants or people posing an immediate threat.
Abraham has accused Israeli media of failing to seriously investigate civilian casualties and rules of engagement in Gaza during the war.
The IDF also rejected the film’s suggestion that civilians who remained in evacuation zones could then be treated as legitimate targets. It said evacuation orders did not change a civilian’s status and that every strike still required identification of a military target and a separate proportionality assessment.
When it came to the film’s portrayal of “Lavender” as an AI-powered list of targets approved for attack, the military said the production had misunderstood what the program was: a database used to cross-reference intelligence on members of militant groups which did not make someone in the database a target.
“Artificial intelligence does not determine whether an object or a person is designated as a target, nor whether a target is struck,” the IDF said, adding that those decisions are made by human analysts and commanders.
The IDF also argued that many of the anonymous soldiers featured in “NAZA” were describing only “limited, initial stages” of the targeting process. “Such testimonies therefore cannot be treated as a complete account of the policies at hand, the decisions made and what ultimately happened,” the military said.
A Guardian News & Media spokesperson, in a statement sent to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, said the Guardian “stands fully behind the film,” which it said was based on three years of reporting by the outlet and its partners and interviews with more than 100 sources familiar with IDF systems used in Gaza, including senior commanders involved in authorizing strikes.
The Guardian also rejected what it described as the IDF’s attempt to portray the film’s interviewees as “junior-ranking officers involved only in the early stages of the targeting process.”
“They include officers and soldiers who were involved in multiple stages of the targeting process in Gaza, including intelligence, operations and the final authorization process,” the statement said.
The military did not describe all 24 participants as junior personnel and said only that the testimony of the soldiers interviewed in the film “generally” focused on “limited, initial stages” of the targeting process.
The Guardian said the “process of assessing the credibility of the testimonies was rigorous” and included “leaked classified documents, detailed verification of specific strikes and corroboration via a wider pool of confidential journalistic sources who did not appear on camera in the film.”
The Guardian also said the New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press had “confirmed the IDF’s use of AI-driven systems in the Gaza offensive and the loosening of safeguards to protect civilians.”
The IDF disputed the film’s suggestion that it did not examine civilian casualties after attacks. Several units tracked strike outcomes and civilian-casualty reports and hundreds of incidents had been reviewed during the war, the military said, arguing that intelligence personnel interviewed in “NAZA” do not appear to belong to those units and “are not positioned to testify on this matter.”
The IDF rejected the film’s criticism that its collateral-damage estimates did not distinguish between adults and children. It said international law treats all civilians as protected regardless of age, adding that when commanders knew children were present, that information “led commanders to cancel, postpone or replan strikes.”
It also pushed back on an interviewee’s claim that the IDF believed there were “no uninvolved civilians in Gaza,” saying that may have reflected the soldier’s personal views but did not represent military policy or orders. It also rejected the film’s genocide allegations, saying the interviewees were not in positions to establish genocidal intent by senior commanders or political leaders.
The IDF also criticized the filmmakers’ reporting methods, saying they provided no dates, locations or other identifying details for alleged strikes and did not put their specific allegations to the military before the film’s release. “The filmmakers could have identified and avoided the substantial errors apparent in the film had they conducted adequate verification and corroboration in good faith. The end result shows they did not,” the military said.
The Guardian statement did not say whether the filmmakers solicited detailed responses from the IDF, and why if they did not..
The military said “NAZA” also gave insufficient weight to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, the group’s use of civilian areas for military activity and measures Israel says it took to reduce civilian casualties, including warnings, changes to strike plans and the cancellation of attacks.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post In its first detailed response to ‘NAZA’ documentary, IDF claims ‘fundamental errors’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Zara removes Halloween costume likened to concentration camp uniform
(JTA) — Spanish fashion retailer Zara removed a children’s Halloween costume from its website on Wednesday after social media users noted that the gray-and-blue striped outfit resembled prison garb worn by inmates in Nazi concentration camps.
Zara described the ensemble as “Kids costume featuring vertical stripes with decorative topstitching, a lapel flower and a distressed effect. Includes a cardigan and shorts. Gray / Blue.”
The post was visible via a Google search that continued to display an indexed version of the Zara product page after the listing itself had been removed.
The costume resembles the suit worn by Michael Keaton’s title character in the 1988 horror-comedy “Beetlejuice” and its 2024 sequel, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” Even so, social media users said the vertical stripes and shiny crisscrosses, which some media outlets described as “fake stitched scars,” resembled concentration camp uniforms and the barbed wire visible in many World War II photos.
Priced at $59.90 in the U.S., according to another indexed version of the listing, the costume drew criticism online in Europe on Tuesday. It gained wider attention Wednesday after Israeli journalist Dov Gil-Har, activist Hen Mazzig and others shared images of it on X.
The listing was no longer accessible by Wednesday afternoon. It was unclear exactly when Zara removed it. No reason was given for its removal, and Zara has not made any public statements regarding the controversy, nor has it responded to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s request for comment.
One Instagram commenter wrote “@zara how many levels of approval did this go though (sic)? Who is working for you?” A Facebook user said “It’s supposed to be a groom costume. It does somewhat resemble a (sic) Auschwitz uniform. With all the anti-semitism on the rise I am not surprised.” Another Instagram user asked, “What were they claiming it was meant to be?”
Zara has in the past faced similar controversies over clothing that evoked Nazi or Holocaust imagery. In 2007, it withdrew a handbag from its stores after a customer discovered a swastika embroidered on it; Inditex, Zara’s parent company, said the symbol had not appeared on the design Zara had approved.
In 2014 Zara apologized for selling a blue-and-white-striped shirt with six-pointed yellow-star badges on the chest. The Zara Israel website identified it as a “striped sheriff t-shirt” and the word sheriff was cut out in small letters on the star. The likeness to concentration camp uniforms and the yellow Star of David badges Jews were forced to wear under Nazi rule led Zara to stop selling the shirts and destroy the remaining inventory.
When reached for comment, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which represents Holocaust survivors in compensation negotiations, said the repeated incidents underscore the need for Holocaust education.
“This is not the first time this has happened and it once again makes abundantly clear: The glaring absence of Holocaust knowledge is pervasive,” Gideon Taylor, Claims Conference president, wrote in an email to JTA. “It shouldn’t take the risk of a Shoah survivor opening their door and seeing children that look like they are in concentration camp uniforms for us to see where we have to do better. This should serve as a message to us all of why Holocaust education is so important.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Jewish groups hail California law making it the first state to list ‘Jewish’ as an ethnicity
(JTA) — California is now the first state in the nation to deem “Jewish” an ethnic and racial identity, rather than just a religious affiliation.
Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday signed SB 1387, a bill that expands California’s legal definition of ethnicity “to include Jewish identity” in demographic data collection. As of Jan. 1, 2029, forms distributed by public entities like schools and prisons will need to include a “Jewish” category when asking for voluntary disclosures of ethnicity or race.
David Bocarsly, CEO of Jewish California, a group that lobbies on behalf of a number of Jewish organizations in the state, described the signing in a statement as “a historic step for the Jewish community.”
“Under the shadow of Nazi race theory, American Jewish leaders asked the government to count us only as a religion,” he said, noting that this approach “didn’t work” and led to exclusion from data that shapes policy.
“Now hate crime, health, poverty, and education data will reflect who Jewish Californians actually are so we can ensure the best support for our community,” Bocarsly added. “Most importantly, it allows us to be seen as the diverse, complex people we are.”
The legislation was a priority among many Jewish groups across the Gold Rush state, who believe that Jewish peoplehood should be connected to more than just religion — and that the law should reflect this relationship.
Newsom, however, expressed some reservations in signing the bill into law.
“I strongly support this bill’s goal: accurate data leads to better understanding to inform policy,” Newsom, who is considering a presidential run in 2028, wrote in a signing statement. But he said he was concerned that the bill’s strictures would make it hard for state agencies to comply with the new law and with federal laws, and recommended revisiting the bill.
In addition to signing SB 1387 on Wednesday — the final day on which he could approve or veto bills in this year’s legislative session — Newsom also authorized AB 395, which will prohibit public meetings and graduations from being scheduled on major cultural and religious holidays.
“Californians of all faiths and backgrounds should be able to fully participate in public life,” the bill’s author, Democratic Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, said in a statement.
“For too long members of our religious communities have been forced to choose between observing their faith and participating in important public events and academic milestones,” added Gabriel, who chairs the California Legislative Jewish Caucus.
Also on Wednesday, Newsom approved AB 1763, which will include religious holiday observance as a type of excused absence in schools without requiring a written request from a parent or guardian.
Newsom signed other bills relevant to the Jewish community in the past few days, including AB 2664, which will establish 100-foot protective zones around entrances to houses of worship.
Another new law is AB 1836, which will close a gap in California’s nonprofit security grant structure by extending funds to off-site religious events like Hanukkah menorah lightings. The governor also approved AB 1853, enacting a ban on including misleading or threatening information, like hate speech, in California voter guides.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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