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Stop. Kashrut certification ahead
By Orly Vilnai
Hundreds of small businesses find the Chief Rabbinate hurdle too high to cross, and fall by the wayside.

For R., the workday begins at 4 A.M. and doesn't end until 9 P.M. She gets on a bus, does the shopping and lands straight into a small room that has become the light of her life, the source of her income, and she starts to cook. She puts all her love and hope into each sandwich she makes and everything she bakes. For half a year now, she has been running a home business selling light meals, sandwiches, salads and cakes, trying to get back on her feet and emerge from crisis and debt.

It all began three years ago. The restaurant where she was working went out of business, and R. was unable to find a job. When the age of 50 is behind you, the politest answer you hear is, "We'll get back to you." Most prospective employers simply tell you to your face that they are looking for young women. She went through all her savings during those sad years, and also the loans she took from the bank. With downcast eyes, she eventually accepted help from her brothers.
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When she refused to accept even one shekel more from them, one of her brothers offered her the small room with a kitchenette in his south Tel Aviv factory. R. leaped at the opportunity and started cooking there. She went from house to house, and from factory to factory selling her wares. Six months later she already has 120 satisfied clients and her niece has joined her to help. At her apartment, not far from there, she bakes cookies and bourekas, a kind savory pastry. Together, the two market to whomever places an order.

This could have been an optimistic story, but just as things were starting to go well, R. came up against the wall of the Chief Rabbinate. R. is traditional in her religious beliefs and practice, and her niece is devoutly Orthodox, but they have not managed to secure a kashrut certificate for their business.

In order to receive such certification, two things must happen: First of all, R. has to pay NIS 1,200 monthly to a kashrut supervisor who will come to inspect the small room where she cooks. And as for her niece, the rabbinate does not grant kashrut certificates to businesses that are conducted in a home, they told her, for fear that the kashrut supervisor might be alone in an apartment with a woman. She will have to rent a place, with all the attendant expenses, and only then will she be able to receive the certificate - after paying NIS 1,200 monthly, of course.

R. knows she will not be able to afford this. "Friends, I want to earn a living," she says. "Let me be and let me do it on my own. I observe the separation of meat and dairy utensils. That's how I grew up and I live with the rules. I don't have the money they are asking for, and am begging them to leave me alone."

A few days ago a large company contacted R., and told her that they had heard about her food and wanted to order regular deliveries. "Just fax us the kashrut certificate," they requested.

"At that moment I thought I would choke," she says. "I knew I was losing a large income source and nothing could be done."

This is also why she asked not to be named in this article, for fear that if the rest of her clients find out about the absence of the certificate, they will leave her.

R. turned for help to MATI, the small business development center at the Industry, Trade and Labor Ministry. There she met a charming woman called Orna Pundak, an organizational and business consultant and above all a woman who will not let any wall stop the people she helps from earning a respectable living. Pundak proposed turning to the rabbis at the synagogues where R. and her niece worship to get confirmation of their religiousness from them, and send this to the rabbinate or to clients as temporary certification. However, the rabbis refused - they don't want to get into any trouble.

According to Pundak, R. is not alone. This is the lot of quite a number of women who work at home and are trying to start a business from nothing. Instead of giving them an opportunity, the religious establishment in these cases leaves them stranded.

It is hard to find people as industrious as R. She will do all she can to earn a living and is in fact doing this, but when it comes to the religious establishment only God can help her; his representatives on earth refuse to do so.

Good to know

This week, precisely in order to help women like R., the Ahoti ("My Sister") organization's first fair trade store opened at 4, Shlomo Hamelekh Street in Tel Aviv - a feminist economic social project that is the first of its kind in Israel. The store sells arts and crafts items, fashion and food made by unemployed artisans, new immigrants, Palestinian women and people - both men and women - from the country's geographic and social periphery.

A visit to the store is not only a rare opportunity to become familiar at first hand with cultural richness and original and beautiful traditional art to which not many people are exposed, but also to do social justice.
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