Pot Bust; Treif Bust

What's worse? Finding over 700 pounds of pot at a Kosher Slaughterhouse or finding out that the Kosher Slaughterhouse isn't so Kosher after all?

From the Forward:

Pot Bust, Meat Scam Hit Kosher Companies

By Nathaniel Popper

The evening of August 30 was a dark one for the kosher food industry.

First, a group of rabbis in New York discovered boxes upon boxes of nonkosher meat in the warehouse of a major kosher meat distributor. At roughly the same time, in Pennsylvania, federal agents seized 726 pounds of marijuana at a kosher slaughterhouse.

The drug bust occurred in Birdsboro at the G & G Poultry facility, which produces kosher chicken under the strictest rabbinic supervision. According to an affidavit from a federal customs agent, the authorities tracked the movement of marijuana in and out of the factory’s parking lot for more than a week before moving in. Of the four people who were arrested during the raid, three appeared to be G & G employees; however, none of them was Jewish. Two of the men arrested in the bust, which was first reported by the Reading Eagle, were undocumented Mexican immigrants, authorities said in a statement.

For kosher consumers, the more disconcerting news came from Monsey, N.Y., where rabbis found packages of nonkosher meat in the storeroom of a local kosher meat distributor. There was no immediate announcement about how long the nonkosher meat had been on the shelves, but Monsey, a heavily Orthodox town, has been plastered with handbills and letters warning residents to ritually cleanse, or kasher, any kitchen supplies that may have touched meat from the wholesaler, Shevach Quality Meats.

Giving voice to the gravity of the issue, Rabbi Meir Weissmandel, a local eminence, wrote a letter to locals Sunday, September 3, speaking of "this appalling transgression: the conspiracy of betrayers who misled the many and deceived in order to mislead Jewish souls and make them impure." [more...]