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Feb 17, 2009

15% increase by bridging gaps

Here is a good point of comparison:

The Rabbanut of Tel Aviv has announced that there has been a 15% increase in restaurants in Tel Aviv requesting kashrut certification from the rabbanut over the previous year.
Rabbi Lau, Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, is pleased with this and sees this as "the success of the attempts to bridge the gaps between the different parts of the nation".

Compare that with the method of bans, protests and extremism as way of getting people to comply or follow suit and behave a certain way. Have they seen a 15% increase in people keeping kosher as a direct result of their methods? Are 15% more people keeping shabbos?

2 comments:

  1. The 15% increase is in the raw number of restaurants receiving certification. It has not been compared with the total increase in the number of restaurants in the area, so it doesn't show anything about an increased desire for kosher.
    Also, the original article counted the number of restaurants receiving certification. In your post, you changed that to "requesting certification". Not all who request receive. To make conclusions about a trend in demand for kosher, we would need to know the number of requests.

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  2. Most restaurants in Tel Aviv serve Kosher food, but were not certified because they stayed open on Shabbat. The reason for the increase is probably that now business lunches out spend Shabbat diners and most business lunches include at least one person who keeps Kosher (50% of Israeli Jews keep some level of Kashrut). Assuming that the above is true, the real bridging of gaps is frum people going out to work and interact on a daily basis with their secular colleagues, most of whom respect the wishes of a co-worker to have lunch at a Kosher restaurant.

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