Published: 25 October 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
European Union officials in Brussels invited Jewish and Muslim community leaders to discuss meat production and religious freedom.
JTA - The event, which was convened by the EU’s point person for fighting antisemitism, Katharina von Schnurbein, included Jews and Muslims concerned about a two-pronged attack on their traditional methods for slaughtering animals for food that has resulted in bans in some countries. About 30 EU officials and about 20 community leaders were present, according to people who were there.
“We’ve had sessions before at the EU where advocates defended shechitah,” the Hebrew word for the Jewish way of killing animals for food, Rabbi Menachem Margolin, who heads the Brussels-based European Jewish Association, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Thursday’s event, he said, “was the first designed to give us a platform, rather than to just have us come and state our case alongside people with the opposite view.”
Animal rights activists say shechitah and zabiha, the Muslim method for slaughtering animals for food, are cruel because both methods preclude stunning before the animal’s necks are cut. Advocates of the customs say they result in no greater suffering to animals than mechanised slaughter methods with higher malfunction rates and less attention to individual animals.
In recent years, opposition to shechitah and zabiha has widened as right-wing parties began adopting this stance as part of their commitment to reducing the presence in society of Islam, and in some cases also Judaism.
When Jewish community leaders challenged recent bans in two of Belgium’s three states at the Court of the European Union, the court dealt them a major defeat when it upheld the bans in a 2021 ruling that Israel’s ambassador to Belgium called “catastrophic and a blow to Jewish life in Europe.”
The ruling added Belgium to a number of EU countries where ritual slaughter is illegal, including Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia and Slovenia. In 2011, the Netherlands briefly joined the list, but the Dutch Senate reversed the ban in 2012, citing freedom of worship. Poland also outlawed ritual slaughter in 2013 but has since scaled back the ban to include only meat for export.
