15 Feb KASHRUS QUESTIONS OF THE WEEK

Please revisit hechsherim when visiting Eretz Yisrael. What is the equivalent to the OU when visiting Eretz Yisrael?

I really don’t like to answer that question because I don’t like to talk about other hashgachos. The one I mention may not deserve to get it and the one I don’t mention may get angry at me that I didn’t include them. I would say that anybody who is traveling to Eretz Yisroel and needs to know where they can eat should find a competent local rabbi in Eretz Yisroel and ask them.

Visiting Eretz Yisrael this year & Shmittah

Number one, people have a very big and wrong impression about shmittah; they think you’re not supposed to eat shmittah products. On the contrary, shmittah products have kedusha. The Torah says “L’achla”, you should eat it. Of course, you can only eat it in the halachically permitted manner, but one should not refrain from eating shmittah produce. So what are the halachos? Anything that grows in Israel that was worked on during the shmittah year may not be eaten.

So if you have a Jewish owned farm, you can’t eat the fruits and vegetables or anything that grows from that farm. The simplest thing to do is to make it hefker. You could walk in and pick your own fruits and vegetables. The other thing is that in Eretz Yisroel, there is a heter of where the Bais Din markets the fruits and vegetables and not the farmer who owns the farm, this is known as ‘otzar bais din’. That is permitted to be bought under the right conditions. That is a very important halacha. There are two important halachos I need to mention about that rule. One is that because of the kedusha that the produce has, it’s not allowed to be wasted. There are very few people that eat the whole apple or orange.

You eat what you want and throw away the rest. You’re not allowed to throw away these shmittah produce. That means that during the shmittah year, you have to eat it up and if you don’t want to eat it up, you have to wait till it’s rotten and then you can dispose of it. I’ll give an example that maybe some of your readers could relate to.

During the shmitta year you buy an orange. Some people eat orange peels. So then the question comes, if people eat orange peels, should you be allowed to throw away the orange peel? That’s why if you go to some yeshivas and seminaries in Israel, you’ll see that they have the orange peels on the window sills waiting for them to get rotten so they can throw them out. Another halacha about the bais din produce is that it may not be taken out of Eretz Yisroel. So as you said, pPeople are going to be coming to Israel and they’re going to want to take fruit back to their family. You can’t take fruit out of Israel that grew during a shmittah year under most circumstances. That includes dried fruit, olive oil, and wine.

We certify, not many, but a few restaurants and hotels in Israel. We won’t let those establishments use the otzar bais din produce. Not because we don’t believe in it, but because at home, we could control that there’s no leftovers or that the leftovers are dealt with appropriately. At a restaurant, I can’t have a mashgiach going over to every table and telling the guests they have to eat everything on their plate. They obviously can’t take the leftovers back into the kitchen once it was on someone’s plate. So we don’t use that produce in restaurants and hotels. What’s most popular in Israel is what grows on non-Jewish farms so anything that comes from chutz l’aretz, or from a farm that is truly owned by non-Jews. It’s a complicated hashgacha because you need to make sure that no one is fooling you.