Opponents of “makeshift slaughterhouses” on Brooklyn sidewalks duked it out in court Tuesday with Jewish leaders over an upcoming religious ritual that involves the killing of 50,000 chickens.
The opponents sued several rabbis and Yeshivas in Crown Heights and Borough Park, asking the court to stop the slaughter and to order the city to enforce its health laws that bar unlicensed slaughterhouses.
Attorney Nora Marino said her clients live and work in the area where nonprofit Jewish groups slaughter the chickens on sidewalks behind police barricades for the Kaporos ritual.
“They’re confronted with this horror every year … the stench, the litter, the filth, the flood, the feces, the feathers,” she said of the 10-day ritual leading up to Yom Kippur.
“First Amendment rights do not give any religious group the right to break the law. This event violates 15 laws,” she said.
David Jaroslawicz, the attorney for Rabbi Shea Hecht, dismissed “all this stuff about chickens running amuck.”
He ridiculed the argument that all the blood and gore creates the potential for a public health crisis of “epidemic” proportions.
“You don’t get sick from inhaling chickens,” he said, only by eating them. “This is make-believe hysteria about something that doesn’t exist.”
Jaroslawicz urged Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Debra James to dismiss the case, contending it was inspired by “a vegetarian group.”
“There may be carnivores in the group,” James demurred. She seemed most surprised by the sheer number of chickens trucked into Brooklyn for Kaporos, which is at the end of September.
“Fifty thousand chickens? Really?” she said.
Nonprofit groups buy the chickens at a low price so supporters can pay a great deal more for them — partly to fulfill a religious obligation to atone for their sins and partly to raise money for the group.
The slaughtered chickens are donated to poor families, Jewish and non-Jewish.
The ritual involves swinging a live chicken overhead three times before slitting its throat. The belief is that the sins of the person are transmitted to the bird.
The ritual goes on for days, leading up to Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar when Jews atone for their sins. This year, Yom Kippur is Sept. 22-23.
James said she’d decide Sept. 10 whether to let the ritual proceed on city sidewalks.
Hecht said his family came to America for religious freedom five generations ago and he’s been participating in Kaporos rituals in Brooklyn for more than 40 years.
“I hope to be doing it until I’m 120,” he said.
Meanwhile, he added, if his organization has to move the slaughtering off city sidewalks and streets onto private property, it will.
“We feel this attack is completely against our religious freedom,” he said.
Marino said it’s more of a fight to get the city to enforce longstanding laws like the one that forbids people from dumping “animal matter into sewers.”
City lawyers said they have the right to decide which laws to enforce and how vigorously. They also urged the case to be dismissed.
