Help End the Use of Chickens in Cruel Kaporos Rituals
Photo by Unparalleled Suffering Photography
For decades, United Poultry Concerns has worked to get members of the Jewish community who observe the ritual of atonement known as Kaporos (also spelled Kapparot) to use money instead of chickens.
This effort is prompted by the horrific cruelty to chickens at Kaporos sites year after year in New York City, Los Angeles, New Jersey, and everywhere the ritual is conducted. Thousands of chickens are trucked onto city streets from factory farms. They are crammed in transport crates without food or water for as long as four days. They are deprived of shelter from rain, heat and cold. Often their toes and feet are ripped off during the neglectful handling of the transport crates where they sit miserably immobilized in their own feces. Many die in the crates of starvation, dehydration, heat stress, and fear. The ritual takes place the week before Yom Kippur, which falls on September 21st this year.
What is Kaporos?
Kaporos (“atonements”) is a ritual preceding Yom Kippur - the Jewish Day of Atonement - in which chickens are “swung” and slaughtered by certain ultra-orthodox Jewish communities. Practitioners wave the chickens over their heads by the legs or by pinning the bird’s wings backward while reciting a chant about transferring their sins and punishment symbolically onto the bird. The chickens are slaughtered in the open air and claimed to be given to “the poor.”
The mistreatment of the chickens before, during and after the Kaporos ritual, when many are left alive, writhing and crying on the ground, violates the New York State animal cruelty law and desecrates the Torah mandate of Tzaar Balei Chayim, which forbids causing unnecessary pain and suffering to animals. It violates the Talmudic mandate that one must feed one’s animals before feeding oneself.
What Can I Do?
Many rabbis have come out against the use of chickens for Kaporos including some who once used chickens but now use money. This year, we have written to the Rabbinical Council of America, the Central Rabbinical Congress of the USA & Canada and 25 other Jewish organizations in New York, California, Florida, New Jersey, and Maryland, urging their leadership to promote compassion by encouraging community members to use money instead of live chickens for Kaporos.
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Please ask the following rabbinical leaders to advocate that
Kaporos be carried out with money instead of chickens.
Rabbi Etan Tokayer, President
Rabbi Menachem Penner, Executive Vice President
Rabbinical Council of America
305 Seventh Avenue, 12th Floor
New York, NY 10001
Phone: (212) 807-9000
Email: office@rabbis.org, president@rabbis.org, mpenner@rabbis.org
Central Rabbinical Congress of the USA & Canada
85 Division Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11249
Phone: (718) 384-6765
Email: info@crckashrus.org
- Please order our brochure A Wing & A Prayer - The Kaporos Chicken-Swinging Ritual and distribute them to your local news media and to anyone else you think might be helpful.
Photo by Unparalleled Suffering Photography