The latest kashrut brouhaha with the Eida Hachareidis is a report on Channel 11 News (Kan) is regarding a winery that put out a line of wine marketed with the celebratory symbols for Israel's 70th birthday.  The Eida has told Psagot Winery that they must either cover up the Zionist symbols on the labels of the bottles, or must cover up the Eida hechsher.

What a conflict! They want to market to a community that will only rely on the Eida hechsher and not any of the other hechshers available, but they also want to market their wine to people who will buy it as part of a celebration of Israel's 70th birthday! And the Eida will only allow it to be one or the other, not both.

Here is a picture of the bottle of wine causing the friction..



It is also possible that the Eida was simply embarrassed to have its logo on a bottle for a company that could not even spell the worth "birthday" correctly for a major marketing campaign taking advantage of Israel's 70th birthday!

The Eida always claims that the kashrut division is independent of the rest of the activities of the Eida and is "kashrus neto" with no involvement in the anti-State activities of the Eida. An incident like this shows that this is not true - they are giving an ultimatum that it is either a symbol of the State of Israel or it is the logo of the Eida, but the two cannot reside on the same bottle side by side.

Being that this is purely a marketing issue, companies feel that having the Eida hechsher will bring them a lot more business, people need to make it known to the companies that the Eida hechsher will expose them to an entirely new market, but it will close them off from other markets.. If the Eida says it can only be one or the other, who can blame them for choosing Eida if there are no ramifications?