Tel Aviv Eateries Go Kosher To Cater For Soldiers, Evacuees

More than 100 Tel Aviv restaurants have rushed to acquire kosher certification so they could cook meals for soldiers, hospitals, and the evacuees of the Gaza border communities. 

The city’s Haachaim (the brothers) restaurant alone has been turning out some 20,000 meals every single day, with the help of around 300 volunteers, according to the Times of Israel. Other Tel Aviv restaurants are also dishing out thousands of meals every day.

But Haachim, like many of the other Tel Aviv restaurants aiding the war effort, are nonkosher restaurants, which rules out their food for many of the soldiers, hospital staff and displaced and evacuated citizens who do observe Jewish dietary laws. 

Thus, they have received emergency temporary certification from the city’s rabbinate to be able to provide those meals, the report says.  

The certification was made possible by former chief rabbi Yisrael Lau, who issued a Halachic (Jewish law) ruling to allow nonkosher restaurants to have emergency kosher certification for this period. 

Shalom Simcha Elbert, a head chef at OCD, one of Israel’s best restaurants and also located in Tel Aviv, also received emergency kosher certification so as to aid the war effort. 

“Two-thirds of the people we’ll be feeding are kosher,” Elbert told the Times of Israel.

“For about seven hours, we had to hold 10,000 meals because we didn’t have the certification,” he said.

“So now we’re closed on Shabbat,” said Elbert. “We don’t believe in keeping kosher and it’s not what we do day to day, but we want to feed people in a way that honors them.”