For example, says Lapidus, in the ’70s, Orthodox Jews would have one oven, one sink, eat canned vegetables with- out a hescher , kasher their dishwasher for Passover, and even go to the movies—all behaviour that is now deemed too liberal. It also took a couple of generations for upward social mobility to kick in, to the point where it was feasible for Jewish households to own more than one oven and pay for all the other infrastructure needed to keep meat and dairy as separate as has become the norm. “You go into houses today, you see two sinks,” says Lapidus. “Back in the day of my grandmother, nobody’s building a second sink. Nobody had the money. You coped with one sink and you managed to be kosher in one sink.” Speaking recently on The CJN podcast Bonjour Chai , Lapidus explained that MK’s Orthodox standards also place a financial burden on the larger constituency of non-Orthodox Jews. “What I see is a kashrus setup that is not responding to the needs of individuals. One of the problems with contemporary kashrus is it’s very much tied to economic social mobility. Buy the bug-free broccoli for two or three times the price. That’s not fair or egalitarian for the whole community.” These more stringent standards don’t just affect what happens in home kitchens: they put pressure on every stage of the restaurant supply chain. End consumers —restaurant customers—cannot absorb every price in- crease. When the economy is strong, people spend money. When it’s not, they don’t. Discretionary spending on din- ing out is always one of the first casualties of budgetary restraint. The harsh reality is that religious Jews must eat kosher food but are not obliged to dine in restaurants. When it gets too expensive, they stop eating out. This makes restaurateurs terrified of passing their increased costs on to diners. “You end up either eating the increase yourself, which affects your margin,” says Azulay, “or you pass it along and it affects your business because people are not willing to pay for it anymore. Or you eat a little bit and pass on a little bit. All you get is margin erosion, a situation where you’re making less money than you need to survive.” Despite all these obstacles, Rachamim is optimistic. Eisenbergs started out as a non-kosher restaurant. Then they had the opportunity to open in the JCC, which required becoming kosher. “That was a big decision,” says Rachamim. “Restaurants are challenging. Being kosher is definitely more challenging. But going kosher for us was the best decision for our company. As soon as we became kosher, we realized that we levelled up and we’re one of the top vendors in kosher.” For Rachamim, the smaller market, though it creates challenges, is an advantage. “The reality of a kosher busi- ness is: it’s niche. It’s a small pool. So there’s less compe- tition. Because of that there’s opportunity, and it’s easy to flourish. I think if you have a good product in the kosher game, you should be okay.”
complains a lot about it,” says Ron Gersh, a gov- ernment relations con- sultant who worked with a bidder, unsuccessfully, to secure a kosher chick- en quota in Ontario. “But this is the business of kosher. You can’t just say, Trust me . That’s not okay for people who keep kosher like myself. You want it at the high- est standards. For some- one who is eating kosher, it’s their connection to God. Eating food that is forbidden damages that connection.” Keeping kosher, but not trusting the health standards of kosher meat producers, Gersh bought his own grass-finished cow and hired a shochet to do the slaughter, at a cost that makes him laugh. “This is what it means to be kosher,” he says. “And this is what God’s peo- ple have to do. Everyone knew what they were get- ting into when they de- cided to live this lifestyle.”
Lapidus says that hasn’t always been the case. Over the last century, he says, Orthodox standards have become more strict, a phenom- enon he attributes to a disconnection from liv- ing tradition. In the wake of the world wars and the Ho- locaust, says Lapidus, “the tradition of doing what your father and your zayde did was gone. Because most of them were dead. So instead of the mimetic tradition, where you imitate your parents, you went to books.” It took some time for the full effects to be realized: in North Amer- ica in the ’60s and ’70s, Orthodox Jews were still guided by yeshivot that had been estab- lished before the war, which tended to be more liberal. Their eventual waning “led to a reliance on books, which make people more stringent. Because the book doesn’t have a heart, the book doesn’t give exceptions. The book is black and white, and you can’t argue with it.”
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