 מצורף קובץדי וווערימיגע וואסער איז שוין ארויסגערינען צו די סעקולערא פרעסע
NEW YORK TIMES
There's Something in the Water, and It May Not Be Strictly Kosher
By MICHAEL BRICK
Published: June 1, 2004
ew York City seems a fine place for an observant Jew to keep kosher. There are specialty shops for the ultra-Orthodox and for those of less strict beliefs.
And it all works out just fine, provided you don't get thirsty. Some rabbis now say that New York City tap water - for a century a gold standard for cleanliness - is not kosher.
These rabbis have recently discovered that there are tiny creatures, called copepods, in the unfiltered water that streams into the city from upstate. These tiny organisms are harmless. But they are crustaceans. And crustaceans are not considered kosher.
Over the past two weeks, concern about the copepods in the water has grown into a matter of intense debate among the city's Orthodox Jews.
Disputes over interpretations of Talmudic law, part sport, part obsession and part spiritual imperative, spill into public view periodically in New York. Last month, for example, members of the Satmar community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, took wigs made of human hair from India and burned them in the street. The wigs were deemed unacceptable because they might have been used in Hindu ceremonies considered idolatrous in Orthodox teaching.
The concern about the water, though, "really spans the entire spectrum," said Harold Skovronsky, an Orthodox Jew who lives in Midwood, a Brooklyn neighborhood where many people wear yarmulkes with business attire.
"They're not scared," he said, "it's purely a religious issue."
Signs of concern abound in neighborhoods like Midwood. At Alexander's Hardware & Locksmith, a worker named Gregory Likhtin has taken the water filters from the shelves and set them up near the cash register.
A few blocks away, officials at Yeshiva Toras Emes Kamenitz elementary school have spent hundreds of dollars installing plumbing gear behind the walls to filter the drinking water.
Midwood is home to Rabbi Feivel Cohen, a ranking religious leader who has taken a stand against drinking unfiltered tap water, according to people who have heard him speak.
Rabbi Cohen declared through a closed door yesterday that he was "not giving interviews."
The dispute over the water is multifaceted and opaque. It goes all the way back to the dispute over the vegetables.
Alei Katif, a company based in Rehovot, Israel, that sells vegetables rabbinically certified as bug-free to those who believe that ingesting insects is counter to Talmudic law, was accused by some Jews in New York of selling contaminated vegetables, said Yair Hoffman, an Orthodox Jew who lives in Far Rockaway, Queens. Alei Katif officials suggested instead that the vegetables became infested upon being rinsed in New York, Mr. Hoffman said.
Two weeks ago, Mr. Hoffman and others tested the company's assertion by inspecting city tap water under a microscope. They saw copepods, millimeter-long zooplankton that are common in the ocean and in groundwater.
"And they're ugly," Mr. Hoffman said.
Ugly though they may be, city officials and independent scientists agree that they are harmless.
"There's absolutely no health risk," said Charles G. Sturcken, a spokesman for the city Department of Environmental Protection.
Jonathan Cohen, a Duke University student who is writing a doctoral dissertation on copepod migration, said that some look like armadillos, some like bowling pins and other like rolling suitcases.
"It would be like swallowing a couple of gnats if you were outdoors on a summer evening,'' Mr. Cohen said. "But it's not like you're ingesting thousands of them."
The city's surface water supply provides 1.2 billions gallons of water daily to eight million people, and its cleanliness has won its overseers permission from federal authorities to skip filtering altogether, relying instead on chemical processes.
But the cleanliness of the water only provides fodder for the debate. What defines an insect? Does seeing one through a microscope constitute seeing one for the purposes of kosher law? And, perhaps most confoundedly, can a person legitimately claim not to see a copepod with the naked eye after looking through a microscope and learning what one looks like?
Reactions from the faithful have been varied. Saul Kessler, who sells wholesale water filters and installs full-home filtration systems in Queens, said he has gotten 100 phone calls from homeowners.
Laser Shum, of Midwood, is still drinking tap water."If you take a microscope, you'll see a lot of things you don't want to see," Mr. Shum said. For Bahar Tuht, 23, an employee of Alexander's hardware store who is not Jewish, the rush on filters has been a learning experience. He has sold about 40 in the last two weeks, compared with about two in a normal two-week period, but his customers have become more selective about the kinds of filters they will buy, following subsequent declarations from their rabbis.
"Some of the filters have a light indicator; the light goes on, it's no good for Shabbos," Mr. Tuht said. "I work here, I sell stuff. You learn."
Patrick Healy contributed reporting for this article.
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פון WINS
Oy Vey! City Kosher Water Controversy
Jun 1, 2004 7:43 am US/Eastern
(New York) -- Orthodox Jews in New York are concerned that the city's drinking water may not be kosher because it contains tiny crustaceans known as copepods.
The organisms, which measure about a millimeter long, pose no threat to human health. But Orthodox teaching bars the eating of crustaceans. They are aquatic animals with skeletons outside their bodies, including shrimp, crab and lobsters.
The organisms first came to the attention of Jewish leaders in Brooklyn two weeks ago. An Israeli produce company that exports kosher vegetables to New York alleged that its products had become infested with insects after being washed in the city's water.
An examination of the water under a microscope revealed the copepods, which are common in unfiltered ocean water and groundwater.
Saul Kessler, owner of a Queens business that sells water filters, says he has received about a hundred phone calls from homeowners eager to weed the copepods out of their drinking water.
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