Mom-and-pops shown the door

From the Queens Chronicle:

The last remaining small stores along the Kissena Curve will be gone soon, replaced by an expanded kosher supermarket, likely reducing foot traffic on the street.

Aron’s Kissena Farms market has a Kissena Boulevard address, 72-15, but like the two megastores on the block, the recently opened Micro Center, an electronics firm, and National Wholesale Liquidators, the entrances are from the rear parking lot only.

The shopping area is between 71st and 72nd avenues. And even now there are few pedestrians walking along the east side of the street.
Merchants say the development’s owner has refused to give new leases to two well-established stores and they will be closing soon. Jasmine Health Foods at 72-09 Kissena Blvd. is winding up its business in a few days. Cards and Gifts at 72-05 Kissena Blvd. will finish within the month.

The owner of the health food store did not want his name used, but said, “They are forcing us out after 20 years. Is that fair?”

Too much competition and not enough Jews

From Crains:

Mazur's Marketplace, a 54-year-old, second generation kosher market that sells meat, groceries and take-out foods in the Little Neck section of Queens, will close down next week. Located in a strip shopping center on the Queens-Nassau County border at 254-51 Horace Harding Blvd., the kosher store once drew customers from both sides of the border.

According to co-owner Eddie Mazur, the business is a victim of increased competition from the likes of Fairway, which opened nearby in Douglaston about two years ago, and Costco. In addition, a bevy of kosher supermarkets have opened in recent years in Great Neck, Long Island, and Jamaica Estates, Queens.

CB9 member will stay

From the Daily News:

A longtime community board member from Queens can keep his unpaid position on the panel despite accusations of sending an anti-Semitic message to three Jewish board members this summer, the board voted Tuesday.

Sam Esposito, a retired NYPD officer from Ozone Park, volunteered to foot the bill for a pizza dinner for Community Board 9 members in June, plus cover the cost of several meals from Ben’s Kosher Deli in Bayside, he said.

But Jewish board members Wallace Bock, Jan Fenster and Evelyn Baron refused to eat the kosher fare because it came from a deli that is open on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. Esposito, who is not Jewish, said he then ordered more food from another deli that the board members deemed acceptable, but they still didn’t like it.

An incensed Esposito later fired off a nasty note to the trio, accusing them of acting like thankless brats.

Bock later filed a formal complaint and the board was asked to decide Esposito’s fate. He survived the no confidence vote, 34-10.

But the recipients of the missive charge that they never got their say. Bock, Fenster and Baron all stormed out of Tuesday’s meeting after the vote, with Bock vowing to resign.

Ok, now that this has been clarified, it's ridiculous that Sam's status was even subjected to a vote. No good deed goes unpunished, I suppose.

CB9 members fight over non-kosher food

From DNA Info:

A member of Community Board 9, which represents Kew Gardens, Richmond Hill, Woodhaven and Ozone Park, is facing the boot after allegedly directing anti-Semitic remarks at other board members over the summer.

Sam Esposito, who has represented Ozone Park on the board since 1988, claims the remarks were not anti-Semitic and were only intended as a criticism of three board members — Evelyn Baron, Wallace Bock and Jan Fenster — for complaining about being served inappropriate food during a meeting in June.

The members, according to an email that Esposito sent them after the meeting, said that the food served before the board’s meeting was not “Kosher enough.”

Esposito wrote that the three board members were “acting like little children that did not get their way at the playground calling daddy on the phone complaining."

According to the email, one of the board members called Rabbi Daniel Pollack, also a board member, to complain that they had nothing to eat.

They also blamed CB9's staff members for ordering food that they were not able to eat, according to the email.

Esposito wrote that they were “ungrateful, selfish, ill-mannered, demanding, unthankful … juvenile, impolite, ungracious, rude.”

“After seeing what I saw at the meeting, if that is what being Jewish is all about, I would rather be atheist because I was raised proper with respect and much different than you three,” he wrote.

After receiving the email, Bock sent a letter to CB9 Chairman James Coccovillo, calling Esposito's email a "vicious anti-Semitic diatribe against the religion which I practice," and asking for his removal. Baron and Fenster also signed the request, which is scheduled to be discussed Tuesday night.

Hold on. I've been to a lot of community board meetings, and none of them had a buffet. So what's up with CB9? Who paid for the food?

V.I.P. = very infested place

From the NY Times:

Fans of KoJel kosher foods like instant pudding, hot chocolate mix and instant noodle soup, brace yourselves: V.I.P. Foods, the Queens food supplier that manufactures the products, had about $1 million in inventory seized by the federal Food and Drug Administration because of “widespread rodent infestation,” federal prosecutors said on Friday.

The F.D.A. seized the foodstuffs from V.I.P.’s Ridgewood, Queens, headquarters on March 19, after inspectors visited on multiple occasions between October and February, according to a complaint filed last month in federal court.

On Oct. 25, inspectors “observed over 1,200 rodent excreta pellets, at least 4 live and dead mice, and rodent-gnawed containers of food,” as well as rodent urine stains on and around foodstuffs, the complaint says.

After receiving notice of the violations, V.I.P. told the F.D.A. that the problems were fixed, but when inspectors returned in February, they found the same problems, the complaint states.

Toby concerned about pork in her hot dogs

From Forest Hills Patch:

The new year won't be happy for New York State's kosher food inspectors, as Gov. David Paterson decided this month to terminate them as of Jan. 1, 2011, as part of an effort to trim a budget deficit that will probably exceed $10 billion next fiscal year.

Paterson plans to slash about 95 percent of funding for the Division of Kosher Law Enforcement, which is part of the state's agriculture department. Currently, the state employs eight kosher food inspectors who carry out about 5,000 inspections a year, examining roughly 3,000 food sellers and manufacturers. All eight will lose their jobs.

However, local politicians and other members of the observant Jewish community railed against the decision, claiming that the state will lose its ability to ensure the integrity of kosher products, thus weakening kosher traditions and respect for kosher law.

"These cuts would undoubtedly mean that untrained Agriculture and Markets inspectors would monitor kosher food, resulting in little or no protection from fraudulent products," said State Sen. Toby Ann Stavisky. "Who is going to make sure that hot dogs containing pork products don't wind up next to the Hebrew National ones?"

There are about 82,000 kosher-certified products for sale in New York State, which is the world's largest manufacturer and consumer of kosher products outside of Israel. The state has enforced kosher inspections since 1915.

Interestingly, there is no Division of Halal Law Enforcement... Why was the state funding a religious practice in the first place?

ESDC gave $1.62M in taxpayer money to shady kosher slaughterhouse

From the Huffington Post:

I won't get into the details of the conditions at New Square Meats; if you're reading this, odds are you likely have a sense of what they might have involved. One of the basic, primary laws of Kashrut implies cleanliness: there is no eating of bottom-feeders, no partaking of animals that chew their cud and don't have cloven hoofs, no noshing on beasts that wallow in mud baths. Animals under the laws of Kashrut also may not be slaughtered if they are unconscious; among the supposed health benefits of this practice (like it or hate it) is the elimination of potentially sick and/or infectious animals from getting into the food supply. Theoretically.

So how could New Square Meats, which is itself affiliated with the Skver Hasidim--a sect that has repeatedly run afoul of the law--so obviously flout not only the religious dietary laws that they are supposed to be adhering to, but government regulations as well?

First, take religion completely out of the equation (since they've already blown a big fat Bronx cheer in the face of kashrut).

The answer?
Logrolling.

New Square Meats recently received a $1.62 million grant from New York's Empire State Development Corporation to help subsidize the cost of building a new, larger slaughterhouse near the one that has just been shut down; they received the money without obtaining the approvals from local town and county planning departments:

As the Forward reported recently, the slaughterhouse, New Square Meats, was already under fire for its attempt to build a bigger plant, five times the size of its current one, close to New Square's border with the town of New Hempstead. The proposed 26,250 square foot slaughterhouse would cost $3 million. Some local officials were particularly upset by the fact that New Square Meats had received a $1.62 million grant from New York's Empire State Development Corporation to help subsidize the new building without getting approval first from the county- or town-planning departments.

What is clear is that where New Square is concerned, the government--at least at the state level--has simply looked the other way for almost an entire decade; the New Square slaughterhouse that was just shut down had been selling uninspected birds since 2002.

Another public authority. Another horrible waste of taxpayer money.

WE NEED THE FEDS!

Queens Kosher Nostra rejects Streit's matzo

From the Queens Tribune:

“The Kosher Nostra, led by rabbinical organizations in Queens and the Five Towns, saw a shakedown opportunity with an icon of the Lower East Side and a rabbi from the most famously independent minded Modern Orthodox family in America. So they waited four weeks before Pesach, unzipped, urinated all over them, and declared something shmekt nit frish [smells funky].”

This year, less than a month before Passover, when Streit’s was filling orders for their peak season, the Vaad HaRabbonim of Queens removed Streit’s Matzo from the list of products that they consider fit for kosher consumption. The Vaad HaKashrus of the Five Towns and Far Rockaway followed. So days before the holiday, Streit’s was taken by surprise. Some stores, like the kosher supermarket Brach’s, pulled the matzo from the shelves. People were confused about the kosher status of Streit’s products. Adding insult to injury, VHQ did not, and still has not, made it clear what the company’s offense was, and how they can get back on the approved list.

Who knew the world of matzo-making was so cutthroat?