ASK OU/YU Seminar - 01. Welcome & Overview

would like to welcome everybody to today's special asco uou kosher uh yom kashu seomiun in conjunction with uh shiva servants okay uh this is a project of the harry h baran ask ou outreach programs that we have here at the ou my name is rabbi ellie ella from the director of community relations here at ou kosher it's my pleasure to be host today for this special event um before we get started i will ask everyone mute themselves unless specifically asked otherwise there will be time at the end of each session hopefully as well as at the end uh for questions and answers i'd just like to go through briefly today's schedule and then we'll get into what's going on so uh our first guest today uh we're first off before posting we'd like to thank the rabbinic training staff at uh you under rabbi menachem penner's leadership ravi larry rothwax and eton for arranging today's presentations in seminar and they get a big they got a big gosh of class for everything that they've done behind the scenes to make this happen um first off and i'm going to introduce him separately in another minute we're going to have every elephant who's our chief operating officer going kosher uh followed by that we will be discussing um different types of macholia with rabbi ali gersten who is our staff for the dinah here at the ou then we'll be discussing food service event is catering with rabbi dolph schreier who is our director of food service at ou kosher we'll be doing a practicum on the digas climb with robert daniels shirat and then we'll be doing talk discussing the caches of the fischer behind goldberg finally with uh questions and answers with shakhtar shlita and every ganache who's the ceo of ou kosher um everyone should have been emailed out a source book as well so we ask that you can refer to that for both the schedule of today's events as well as any marmot como's and additional documents that might be helpful uh to guide you along in this journey through conscious today um we're going to start with rev elephant who is our chief operating officer and executive demon coordinator of ou kosher a man who i see plenty of people already are familiar with him through his da filming room that spans the globe and the amount of time that he has because of that besides the fact that he's a terrific boss as well as someone who keeps us going on a daily basis whether we're in our office or working remotely uh kasha still chugs along so um ruby elephant i welcome you to speak now my elephant's gonna give an overview of oukosha where it is where it stands and how to how we can best help you as well every elephant thank you very much rabbi eleph and thank you to everybody who joined us today to listen relay goldstein asked me a moment ago if i said it that field michelle today and i responded i actually said two already and one of them was on a gemara that i'm a little ahead daf and there's a gemara which i think is so impract is so important to today's sessions that you're going to be enjoying the gemara discusses if you're allowed to write sephora turret filler mezuzah on the hide of a fish and the gemara says we need our navi to come and answer the question and the quran asks what's elijah nothing going to add to this discussion so the gemara says the simple explanation of pascal's omason means are they still clean or unclean if they're not clean obviously we can't you use them for riding sephora turret filling mesos and many mepharsham actually we're showing them the round already asked the question you don't need leon novi to tell us if something is clean or dirty just look at it smell it and you'll know yourself says a beautiful shot which i think will frame today's discussions the semester says that we know all animals in order to be able to eat them we first have to go through the shrita process fish don't have to go through any shrita process to be eaten you could eat a fish without any animals that are sanctified by going through the shrita process have that kedush in them and therefore are proper to be used to write surface turrets filaments something however a fish that did not go through a shrita process doesn't have that kedusha that infuses the fish and therefore it may not be something that you should write say for turret filament on when i when i learned that seventh i repeated this for semester my sheer i thought to myself i think that the lesson here is that kosher food besides that it's the mitzvah that the torah of course tells us that we're only allowed to eat kosher food mahalo are very serious yes sir i think there's much more to be said kosher food when going through the process of making kosher food whether it's of course shrita on an animal or all the other parts of the process that you're going to hear about today mr shem about making food kosher infuses a kedusha into the food and by infusing that kedusha into the food we're refusing kedusha into our lives when we eat that kosher food and therefore we're so anxious particularly in these days you know many mitzvahs that were so accustomed to do we're not able to do for the last couple of months whether it's through a little bit sieber whether it's learning in the basement rich or other things that we're so accustomed to do in our avoid hashem that we've been unable to do but the one constant you know i was thinking that as much as they closed down all of the city and they closed out all the stores they realized that you can't close down the supermarkets because people have to eat and you can't close down casters either because people have to eat kosher food because that is what still is infusing kedusha entire lives but actually it's not just on the rook approach that i want to to mention it also is on a very practical mention you know i i've been getting a lot of calls i was interviewed recently in a very popular publication and i've been getting a lot of feedback about that interview regarding well how is the ou managing in a world where you can't go anywhere and in fact the particular emphasis in that conversation was china where china i'm not going to go into the discussion of china's role in the covet virus it's not my area of expertise i have no right to discuss that but one thing we know that china has been essentially locked down and the ou itself certifies over 600 facilities in china which is amongst the close to 10 000 facilities we certify in over a hundred countries around the world in every one of the 50 states of the united states and now the issue became how to grant certification in a world that we can't visit because on the basis of our they're really two types of asgojo that you're going to hear about today one type of ashkoka is where food has to be prepared with full-time rabbinic supervision so of course as i mentioned a moment ago shrita so you can't have kosher shrita without shaykh without masjid him sort of watching the salting process with him supervising the removal of the different parts of the animal we may not eat we're at him checking the lungs of the animal and the other parts of the animal to determine if it's kosher i heard rabbi said that one of your first speakers today is going to be our distinguished colleague rabbi gersten who's going to be speaking about bisholakim i presume he's going to be speaking about venusakum so again these are foods that you have to have personal jewish involvement to have kosher cheese because your heart cheese nothing to do with how you throw you need to have a froome jew poor in the rennet to have officially throw you'd need a jew to turn on the fire but when we speak about and so in those situations we were able to we're only able to give hashgaka with masjidhan present and if we can't get much girham there or the company can't allow him or whomever to be at doing what they have to be doing there's no discussion we can't just give out and we can't make that available it's not debatable but then the vast majority the vast vast majority of facilities that we certify in the united states and around the world are facilities that are essentially all culture always making just kosher food so typically only making just pariv or typically just making dairy and we have them machine coming in on a unannounced statement we're coming on an unannounced basis when i say we're coming on an unannounced basis we also determine how often the masjid should come for example if we're certifying a facility that is battling water so our policy is that we will never never give a hajj without personally visiting the facility but obviously there's not that much to be concerned about in a water facility and we'll visit it infrequently a facility that's using complicated ingredients so if you'll have a facility that's a bakery so it's an all-kosher bakery there's no concern it's all power or it's all dairy everything there's supposed to be kosher but obviously there's a myriad of ingredients there and because they have so many ingredients we need to make sure the company agrees that they're only going to use ingredients that they've told us they're going to use that we've allowed them to use but the way we give that gohan this is the basis of what you're going to be hearing today is onomersis and emersus means that we could show up and we do show up on an unannounced regular basis and that keeps them scared the word mercies can makes them concerned that they're going to get caught if they do something wrong so what happens now in the new world where you can't just show up they won't let you in so we've had to deal with this because again we can't be left in a world that people won't have what to eat and that camp is all the more so complicated but it's not just facilities here but it's facilities all over so we've begun to give us gaja on a virtual basis again it's a temporary situation i can't emphasize enough that this is not something that we're anxious to do and i could tell you the good news that we have been monitoring and the way i could see that the world is barak hashem getting better because i get a report every week of how many visits we did that week and how many were virtual and how many were real and the numbers bark hashem have been going steadily in the direction that there are many more real visits than virtual visits for example last week we were already up to 900 visits were conducted that i have a record of and 600 of them approximately were done in the real old-fashioned way 300 were done in a virtual manner but again even when we do it on virtual we do the following we have a masjid who knows the facility we call them rabbinic field representatives who knows the facility going together virtually with face time or zoom or whatever looking around the facility no not they're not knowing where we're going to ask this person to work and what to walk and let us see what's going on what we also do is forensic so what we're asking the company to do is give us the invoices and the shipping records of all the ingredients that they're receiving and we're making sure that it makes sense with the amount that they're using and we're seeing weirdos ingredients again we're focused more on the sensitive ingredients when i use the word sensitive i mean sensitive in the eyes of kosher to make sure that we're getting a good picture of what's going on in the world in the facility and then all the ingredients are being used in the facility but what really i'm trying to say besides giving you besides answering the question that's in the mind of everybody on this call so how does the ou continue to work um in this world so all of us who work in the office we have over 50 rabonan in our headquarters in manhattan are all working out of home but we're all connected with each other we meet and speak regularly we had incredible seattle deshmaya that we could work completely remotely so even though we haven't been in our office for many months um and don't know when we will be returning we're able to access not just obviously our emails and messages but all information we need in order to be able to give dash and that's how we're able to also be in touch on a regular basis with all of them and all of the factories what we weren't doing was when a company wants to get ou supervision the first thing we always do is have what's known as an initial inspection i guess in the real world it would be called a feasibility study where we have somebody go visit the facility and see what's going on to determine if and how we could give ajojo that we obviously did not do during the period that we cannot get into factories now that we could berkshire and get back into factories that is resuming but again we're very very focused on one hand being maintaining high standards of koshers being able to however deliver kosher food to the community that still very much needs to eat but also being able to use and then i think will probably be the theme of today's discussions to be able to use mon technology and use all of the kochma that exists in the world to be able to maintain these standards and make sure that all of us are still able to enjoy as much kosher food as we would like still supervised at the highest standards so i'm sure you're going to find this discussion today extremely educational and enlightening and certainly i think the timing at this time of our lives and this time of the history of the world will be very much informative to you and to the people that you work with and we're anxious to hear your comments and your questions as the day goes on thank you very much for inviting us and we hope that this will be the first of many other occasions um rabbi ellis introduced himself as the director of community outreach at the ou he was just recently named to that position um his predecessor unfortunately rabbi grossman was nifter a couple of months ago and one of rabbi ella's jobs and one of his responsibilities and something that we're going to be very much focused on is communicating with rabona people who are currently rubbed on our future rabonum in claudius road we believe that this relationship this communication that we're developing between ourselves and yourselves is incredibly important as you are the people who get will be getting or are getting the shy list from your communities and informing you of what is going on and making ourselves constantly available to inform you what's going on will make us all able to do the avoid the psychologist that we are charged with of making sure that our bodies are nourished with macholic shears with macholis that bring kedusha to our lives thank you very much