Kars4Kids Charity Loses Big on Real Estate

Lots of Losses: Kars4Kids gets thousands of cars donated by people who think they’re helping children. Little of the money actually went to programs, like this idyllic Jewish summer camp.

$29 Million in Gifts Translates to Just $6 Million in Programs

A multimillion dollar nationwide advertising campaign featuring an inescapable radio jingle and a freckle-faced boy in a convertible has brought the Orthodox Jewish charity known as Kars4Kids more than 60,000 donated vehicles a year.

Those gifts, worth $29 million, support Orthodox outreach to non-Orthodox Jews, including a fancy summer camp for Jewish children.

But Kars4Kids and Oorah Inc., an affiliated not-for-profit organization, lost nearly as much speculating on real estate in 2010 as they spent on programming.

The two closely linked organizations wrote off a combined $5.25 million in losses that year after lenders foreclosed on three separate real estate developments. A fourth development, foreclosed on in 2009, had earlier wiped out $3 million in donated funds.

Meanwhile, Oorah, the operation’s program arm, spent only $6.3 million of the $29 million collected by Kars4Kids on program expenses in 2010, despite the fact that the organizations hold a combined $39 million in assets.

“[Kars4Kids] promotional materials say that the donation will benefit children,” wrote Sarah Holloway, an expert at not-for-profit management and a professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, in an email to the Forward. “I don’t think donors would be pleased if they found out that some of these monies were going toward anything other than that programming and reasonable overhead.”

Jeffrey Stern, Oorah controller and chief financial officer, defended the organization’s financial practices. “We do keep our promise to donors that their gifts will benefit children, and we are proud of the fact that one way we do it is by planning and investing in the long term,” Stern wrote in an email to the Forward. He said that his organization’s investment program “actually exceeded” not-for-profit oversight standards.

This high-profile charity campaign has made news before. Kars4Kids has previously paid cash settlements to attorneys general in two states over its failure to identify its activities in advertisements as benefiting a specific religious group. In early January, a federal jury found that Oorah owed more than $300,000 in scholarships to a Staten Island Jewish day school.

Based in Lakewood, N.J., Oorah operates summer camps for boys and girls and offers mentorships, scholarships to Jewish day schools and other programs that seek to bring Orthodox Jewish life to non-observant Jews. The organization actively serves 2,000 families, according to Yehoshua B. Weinstein, Oorah’s director of outreach development.

“Our goal is to be able to offer them opportunities,” Weinstein said. “I think anybody who comes to an Oorah program — you would be touched, and it would make a difference in your life. That’s the point of what we’re doing. We’re not here to particularly change people, we’re here to be able to offer them different opportunities.”

Oorah’s summer camp facilities are relatively luxurious. The camps feature petting zoos, horseback riding and game rooms with video game systems. Oorah also offers a matchmaking program for the newly religious.

Oorah spends millions on these efforts. In 2010, the group spent $3.5 million on its camp, $1.1 million on outreach and $970,000 on scholarships.

Kars4Kids, which is registered with tax authorities as J.O.Y. for Our Youth, and Oorah also make unsecured loans to charities and individuals. As of December 2010, the two groups had a combined $210,000 in outstanding loans. Stern, Oorah’s CFO, said that the loans were related to the organization’s mission.

But those expenditures hardly match the tens of millions that Kars4Kids raised through its nationwide solicitation of car donations.

Of that nearly $30 million, Kars4Kids spent $8.3 million in advertising in 2010, paying for billboard space and the airing of its catchy-despite-itself jingle.

The organization then turned over $19 million to Oorah. In addition to program expenses, Oorah spent $14.7 million on capital expenditures. Stern characterized Oorah’s capital expenditures as mission related.

“These projects include our summer camps in upstate New York and our preschool and adult education programs in Staten Island, all of which are an integral part of fulfilling our mission,” Stern said.

Stern said he did not have time to respond to a request for details on what proportion of the millions in capital expenditures was program related and what proportion went to investments.

Unlike private foundations, public charities like Oorah and Kars4Kids are not required to spend a fixed proportion of their assets on programming annually. Though the Internal Revenue Service has in the past issued rulings against public charities that have spent too little of their funds on program expenses, it has not done so in recent decades, according to Nicholas Mirkay, an expert in not-for-profits and tax law at Creighton University School of Law, in Omaha, Neb.

Kars4Kids’s vehicle donations are not Oorah’s only fundraising ventures; it also markets phone cards and sells electric, telephone and gas service through a subsidiary called Cucumber — as in: “What’s your name?” “Mary Jane.” “What’s your number?” “Cucumber!” — according to the group’s website.

An auditor’s report submitted to the New York State attorney general in 2009 recorded only $51,000 in unrelated business income on $646,000 in sales. Stern cited “changes in the regulatory environment” for Cucumber’s slim profits, saying that the organization was looking at new sources of revenue in order to increase its subsidiary’s profitability.

Oorah also runs a heavily promoted Chinese auction each year, offering big-ticket items such as cars, electronics and trips. In 2010, the organization reported that the auction brought in $2.2 million, yet operated at a $6,000 loss.

Oorah also aimed to raise money by investing in real estate development. It’s not clear when the group began investing with developers, though auditor reports note investments going back to 2008. Reports filed with the Office of the New York State Attorney General do not specify the names of the developers involved or the specific locations of the projects, but by comparing descriptions with press accounts, it appears that at least two of the investments were made with a developer named Leib Puretz.

Reportedly the largest developer on Staten Island, Puretz is facing foreclosures and bankruptcies on a number of properties.

One Puretz development, a proposed 380,000-square-foot outlet mall in Staten Island, defaulted on loans in 2008 and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2011, according to press reports. Oorah and Kars4Kids had invested $2.5 million in the property, reflecting an 8% ownership share. The property was foreclosed on in 2010.

Oorah also invested $3 million in a Staten Island hotel, a 29.58% ownership share, that was foreclosed on in 2009. That hotel appears to be another Puretz development, the Staten Island Hotel in Graniteville.

Other bad real estate investments by Oorah and Kars4Kids include a $2.25 million investment in a Jersey City, N.J., high-rise that was foreclosed on in 2010 and a $500,000 development project in Jerusalem, also foreclosed on in 2010.

“These investments were made as part of a highly structured, diversified investment program designed with an eye to our future program growth, while maintaining a stable operational cash flow,” Stern wrote in an email. Stern noted that many leading charities suffered significant losses in the wake of the 2008 economic crises.

Stern also asserted that although the foreclosed properties had been written off as losses for accounting purposes, they were not valueless. He said that the property developer had personally guaranteed the investments, and that “half” of Oorah’s losses had been recouped and that the organization expected to recoup the remainder over the next 18 months.

Stern did not respond to follow-up questions about which investments had been recouped, how they had been recouped and whether Kars4Kids’s real estate investments, as distinct from Oorah’s investments, had been recouped.

Charity experts expressed concerns about the real estate investments.

“Charitable trustees are supposed to invest in only the kinds of investments that a prudent person would invest in,” said William Josephson, former head of the charities bureau of the New York State Attorney General’s Office, which regulates charities like Oorah and Kars4Kids. Told of the Forward’s findings, Josephson said that the information “raises serious questions about whether [the organization] has met that standard. If I were still the head of the charities bureau, I would be launching an inquiry.”

Stern wrote that the investments were prudent at the time they were made, and were subject to rigorous oversight.

“Our portfolio was appropriately diversified to account for what were then reasonably foreseeable economic fluctuations. The fact that one aspect of an investment program did not perform as planned does not demonstrate a lack of oversight,” Stern wrote. The investments “were vetted and executed based on professional advice and meeting our stringent internal guidelines.”

Kars4Kids Charity Accused in Tuition Feud

Oorah Wouldn't Fund Jewish Day School Education, Suit Says

An Orthodox Jewish charity known for its omnipresent radio jingles is embroiled in a federal lawsuit over $300,000 in scholarships that were allegedly promised to Jewish day school students.

A charity closely affiliated with Kars4Kids, which runs a high-profile national advertising campaign soliciting donations of used cars, is accused of backing out of a deal to pay tuition for dozens of students it placed in Staten Island’s Jewish Foundation School.

One school official called the dispute “the saddest episode” in his half-century career in Jewish education.

The charity, which has been cited in an unrelated incident for failing to tell donors it was raising money for religious purposes, insists it never promised to foot the bill for the years for which the school says it owes tuition.

“We have a monetary dispute to settle, but we’re not looking to make it into a street fight,” Eliyohu Mintz, president of the Kars4Kids-affiliated charity, Oorah, told the Forward. Oral arguments in the trial began on January 9 in Brooklyn Federal Court.

Kars4Kids, which airs the 1-877-KARS-4-KIDS radio spot nationwide, donates millions annually to Oorah. The groups share an address in Lakewood, N.J. Oorah in turn funds scholarships and summer camps for Jewish children. The JFS was one of many Orthodox schools that students attended on Oorah-funded scholarships.

The feud between the school and the charity began in 2006, when the school claims that Oorah started falling behind on tuition payments and not paying the full amount the charity owed.

The school says it responded by soliciting the students’ parents to make up the shortfall. That move angered Oorah, which cut off payments to the school.

Oorah claimed that the school’s fundraising effort was harmful, as the parents of the children were not religious and had agreed to send their children to the Orthodox school only because it would be free.

The two sides took their dispute to a rabbinical court. The three-rabbi panel found that Oorah owed the school funds for the 2006–’07 school year.

“Since the organization kept the children in the school, it is responsible to pay their tuition,” the panel wrote.

The dispute escalated when Oorah claimed that the school violated the rabbinical panel’s order to avoid publicly criticizing the charity.

In a 2008 school newsletter, Marvin Schick, president of the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School, which controls the JFS, wrote, “Oorah’s wrongdoing is the saddest episode in my more than 55 years of devotion to Torah [education].”

Oorah sued the school, alleging breach of the agreement brokered by a rabbinical court the previous year. Oorah’s lawsuit was filed in state court in New Jersey in order to keep the case quiet, according to Ronald Coleman, an attorney for Oorah.

The dispute over the alleged breach of contract has yet to be settled. But in its response to Oorah’s allegations, the school counter-sued in Brooklyn Federal Court, claiming that it was owed $375,100 in unpaid tuition.

That counter-suit is being heard in the jury trial that began on January 9.

The school’s lead attorney, Eli Feit, claimed in his opening argument that a 2002 agreement on scholarships was still in effect from 2007 to 2009 but Oorah had refused to pay for the students studying in the school during those years.

Feit claimed that the school had no choice but to educate the Oorah-sponsored children.

“Expelling these children is simply not an option for us,” Feit said.

In his opening statement, the charity’s lawyer, Frederick Whitmer, countered that there was no further agreement between Oorah and the school after the 2006–’07 school year and that the charity had every right to cut off the payments.

“The reason we didn’t pay this money is because we weren’t obligated to,” Whitmer told the jury.

The trial is expected to end by January 13.

It’s not the first time Kars4Kids has found itself the subject of legal scrutiny. In 2009, the organization paid tens of thousands of dollars in settlements to state attorneys general in Pennsylvania and Oregon over their failure to disclose that the funds raised through their vehicle donation program benefited children of a specific religion.

The New York State Attorney General announced in 2010 that it had subpoenaed Joy for Our Youth — the name under which Kars4Kids is incorporated — as part of a broader investigation of charitable car donations.

Inside the Ultra-Orthodox Shomrim Force

Jewish Security Patrol Wins Kudos and Takes Criticism

When 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky went missing in Brooklyn last June, it took two hours for anyone in Leiby’s ultra-Orthodox neighborhood to inform the police. The local volunteer Jewish security patrol heard almost immediately.

The patrol, known as the Shomrim, organized a massive posse to search Boro Park for the boy. But it was the police who found him days later — hacked to pieces, in a nearby dumpster and in the alleged murderer’s freezer.

Jewish security patrols have existed for decades in Orthodox enclaves in New York, but few have received as much outside attention as the Boro Park volunteers in the days after Leiby’s murder. Early on, the Shomrim’s rapid response drew praise, but after the praise came questions, some of them damning.

A new book by former Christian Science Monitor staff reporter Matthew Shaer goes some way toward explaining why Leiby’s parents didn’t call the cops when they lost their child. In Hasidic Brooklyn, the Jewish Orthodox security patrol is more than just a neighborhood watch: A powerful local force, it is central to communal identity, and in a community eager to preserve its insularity, it forms a buffer against secular authorities.

Shaer’s book, “Among Righteous Men: A Tale of Vigilantes and Vindication in Hasidic Crown Heights,” doesn’t deal directly with the Shomrim of Boro Park. Instead, it looks at a Lubavitch neighborhood in Crown Heights and digs deep into the culture and context of a similar patrol that operates there.

In December 2007, the Crown Heights Shomrim stormed a yeshiva dormitory unprovoked, thrashing yeshiva boys in a large-scale gang attack. Or perhaps the Shomrim themselves were ambushed, set upon and outnumbered after being lured into a trap. The brawl in room 107 at 749 Eastern Parkway — and the ongoing dispute about what actually happened there — is at the center of Shaer’s story. The implications of the fight ripple across Crown Heights and the entire Lubavitch empire.

The yeshiva boys and the Shomrim are on opposite sides of a rift within the Lubavitch movement over the memory of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the movement’s charismatic rebbe, who died in 1994. While the Lubavitch establishment fears that expression of the messianic hopes that continue to surround Schneerson might scare away nonobservant Jews, fervent radicals like the yeshiva boys are swept up in the hope of imminent redemption. Without a strong successor to heal the rift, the split has grown severe.

That much is well known. But what Shaer shows is that the division is even more acute in Crown Heights itself, where a brain drain has seen the young families from the Lubavitch mainstream leave Brooklyn to serve as emissaries in far-flung outposts, giving the messianists disproportionate sway over the movement’s spiritual headquarters. Crown Heights is a battlefield in an internecine war that’s mostly cold but sometimes flashes hot.

The moderate Shomrim are key players in the fight for the neighborhood. A bunch of working-class Lubavitchers headquartered in an auto body shop, they don’t fit the stereotype of the young Hasid tethered to his books. Though they patrol the streets in vehicles that look strikingly similar to real cop cars, they’re more like a gang, or perhaps a college frat, than a professional police force. They have a beef with just about everyone in the neighborhood: the messianist yeshiva boys, a rival patrol called the Shmira and even the police.

Shaer’s description of the relationship between the Shomrim and the local police precinct is particularly telling. In one scene, a local community affairs officer of the New York City Police Department asks the Shomrim to declare a truce with the Shmira, to accept police training and to submit their members for background checks. The Shomrim refuse.

Shaer writes that “the average Hasid preferred to be policed and protected by his own. A security patrol vetted and trained by the city would really just be a proxy for the city and therefore somehow tainted.”

Things get hot for the Shomrim after they turn down the police department offer. For a group of men dedicated to a lifestyle apart from contemporary society and culture, their wartime tactics are surprisingly modern and high-tech. An anonymous blog, presumably run by the Shomrim, bashes the Shmira online. Shmira members take to interfering with Shomrim radio channels, so the Shomrim hire an expert to use advanced radio equipment to catch them in the act.

Perhaps most shockingly for the insular Lubavitchers, the fight makes its way to the New York court system. Prosecutors bring a criminal case against the Shomrim over the dormitory brawl, with help from men sympathetic to the Shmira — a stunning development in a community that has its own parallel religious legal processes and strict mores against airing disputes before secular courts.

Throughout, Shaer reveals the messy underbelly of Lubavitch Crown Heights with the language and pacing of the true-crime genre. He creates compelling characters out of the dispute’s colorful central figures, and expertly weaves context with narrative, though at times Shaer’s descriptions are overwrought: One cop’s desk is piled with “enough paper to power a Kinko’s joint for six years”; an Israeli speaks English with a “chewy” accent.

More significantly, the dormitory fight that is the book’s centerpiece is a messy, complex case. There’s no clean ending here. Though a state jury hands down a decision, the questions that remain about the fight and its motivations could leave a reader feeling frustrated even after the book ends with the “vindication” promised in the title. But the complexity of the story is not Shaer’s fault, and his distillation of the broad crisis facing the Lubavitch community is a compelling one.

As for the wider implications for Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox security patrols, Shaer’s book goes some distance toward humanizing the Shomrim. But the author does little to assure us of their competence. For these independent Jewish security patrols, it seems that their independence is as much the point as their security work.

Kosher Meat Still Slaughtered Inhumanely

Even After Scandal, 'Shackle and Drag' Method Still Used Overseas

Agriprocessors’ 2008 kosher slaughter scandal provoked solemn vows of reform among producers of glatt kosher meat in the U.S. But despite some industry improvements, America’s leading kosher certification authority continues to authorize the sale of millions of pounds of glatt kosher beef slaughtered by means that animal welfare experts condemn as inhumane, a Forward investigation has found.

The questionable practices occur in South and Central America, where the primitive slaughter method known as shackle and drag is used in factories that supply American glatt kosher distributors.

Though the Orthodox Union, the country’s largest kosher certification agency, has said that it objects to the practice, it has continued certifying meat produced by this method despite years of public criticism. O.U. officials say they must also take into account the impact that banning import of such meat would have on beef prices.

But some animal rights activists are now calling the huge kosher certification agency to account.

“Years of inaction have demonstrated that the O.U. is, in fact, complicit in this abuse” despite rhetorical opposition to these practices, wrote Hannah Schein, manager of undercover operations for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, in an e-mail to the Forward.

Beginning in 2004, successive investigations by various groups, government agencies and media outlets, including PETA and the Forward, revealed a pattern of mistreatment of animals and workers at the Agriprocessors plant in Postville, Iowa. An infiltration of the plant by undercover PETA operatives found that cattle were allowed to struggle on the floor for up to three minutes after their throats were cut.

Agriprocessors filed for bankruptcy in November 2008, months after a massive federal immigration raid on the plant. Meanwhile, religious groups and activists called for reform in the kosher slaughter industry.

Three years later, some practices have improved at the kosher plant that was at the heart of the controversy. But other practices that kosher officials call problematic continue, both at the former Agriprocessors plant and elsewhere in the industry.

Observant Jews in America generally seek meat slaughtered under the glatt kosher standard, which has effectively replaced the less stringent non-glatt as the religiously acceptable certification for kosher beef in the United States. The O.U. has not certified non-glatt beef since the 1980s, and while mass producers like Hebrew National continue to produce kosher beef that is not glatt, they do not cater to the observant Jewish market.

The glatt kosher beef industry, like the meatpacking industry at large, is opaque. Information on the slaughterhouses is surprisingly hard to find. Even basic figures like the size of the glatt kosher beef market in the United States are nearly impossible to gauge.

Most experts agree that three major firms sell the lion’s share of glatt kosher beef in America. Two of them, Agri Star Meat and Poultry based in Postville, Iowa, and Minnesota-based Noah’s Ark Processors Corp., own their own slaughterhouses in the United States; the third, Maspeth, N.Y.-based Alle Processing, rents time at a slaughterhouse in Illinois and imports frozen beef.

It’s largely that imported frozen beef that has animal rights advocates up in arms.

No meatpacking plants in Central and South America certified by the O.U. to supply glatt kosher beef to the United States use upright pens — the humane gold standard — to slaughter cattle, according to Rabbi Menachem Genack, rabbinic administrator of the O.U.’s kosher division. American abattoir certified by the O.U. use upright pens almost exclusively.

The slaughter methods used in Central and South America, on the other hand, have been all but banned from American glatt kosher plants.

“It’s not the system we recommend or have been advocating,” Genack said of the Central and South American plants’ practices. “There’s an attempt to wean [the Latin American operations] away from the system, which is what we would like. It hasn’t happened yet.”

But the O.U.’s chief kosher official has said this before, notably in a 2008 article in the Forward and in a 2010 article in the Los Angeles Times.

“I know it’s a long period of time, but we’re juggling,” Genack said. “There are competing considerations here. It’s quite easy to say, ‘Why don’t we just cut out South America?’ But it would represent a disruption of supply and inevitably would mean kosher meat would go up higher in price. We’re trying to supply a modest cost for struggling families. That’s the whole concept behind the O.U.”

Genack acknowledged that the Central and South American plants’ use of the controversial shackle and drag method of slaughter was problematic. In this process, the cattle’s legs are bound and the animals are flipped onto the ground before the shokhet, or ritual slaughterer, cuts the animal’s throat.

The method is used in part because these Latin American plants ship most of their product to the Israeli beef market, and kosher guidelines enforced by the Israeli Chief Rabbinate require cattle to be inverted during their slaughter. The inverted position of the cow is thought to keep the animal from pushing against the slaughterer’s knife. Excessive pressure exerted by the cow or the shokhet would make the kill unkosher.

The upright pens used in the United States are considered by animal welfare experts to be far more humane than other methods. They keep the animal standing during the slaughter, and secure their heads to keep them from applying pressure to the knife.

In the shackle and drag method, “they’re just dragging them out of a box and holding them down on the floor with five guys on top of them,” said Temple Grandin, a humane slaughter expert whose innovations in animal handling have been adopted industrywide.

An article published by Grandin on her website calls the shackle and drag method a “serious problem” and indicates that a slaughterhouse using the method would fail an animal welfare audit.

Central and South American plants also use the better-known shackle and hoist method — a practice outlawed in the United States since 1958 — though there are signs that this practice is declining.

In a shackle and hoist kill, live cattle are raised in the air by a chain tied around their leg before they are slaughtered. The American law banning this practice permitted an exception for ritual slaughter. And the method is said to continue at a few small abattoirs in the United States. But no slaughterhouses certified by the O.U. in the United States employ shackle and hoist or shackle and drag.

Both shackle and hoist and shackle and drag are thought to be more dangerous for slaughterhouse workers than the upright pen.

In 2000, the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, the highest authority on Jewish law in Conservative Judaism, unanimously ruled that shackle and hoist is a violation of Jewish laws against cruelty to animals and unnecessary risk to human life.

It’s impossible to know exactly how much glatt kosher beef is imported from Latin American plants that continue these problematic practices.

An extensive search using the paid online database Import Genius, which catalogs all shipboard deliveries into the United States, revealed that Alle has imported nearly 30 million pounds of frozen beef from Latin America since 2006.

Imports by the firm have remained relatively steady over the past five years, with the exception of a huge spike in imports in late 2008 and the first half of 2009, when the Agriprocessors plant went offline. Over the past 12 months, Alle has imported at least 850,000 pounds of beef.

Most of that meat has come from two plants: Frigorifico Las Piedras, in Uruguay, and Centro Internacional de Inversiones S.A., in Costa Rica. An official at the Uruguayan plant would not comment on the plant’s slaughter practices; an official at the Costa Rican plant missed a scheduled interview without explanation and did not respond to a subsequent attempt to contact him.

Sam Hollander, Alle’s owner, also did not respond to a request for comment. His firm sells processed and frozen beef under its Mon Cuisine and Meal Mart brands, and also sells kosher meat to airlines under its Schreiber brand.

Although no other kosher firms were listed in the Import Genius database, that database would not include beef sent into the country by truck or train and would miss imports delivered to intermediary companies contracted by the kosher firms to facilitate the delivery process.

In a statement, Agri Star said that all the meat used in its “fresh meat operation” is processed locally, but a spokesman would not say whether that applied to its frozen and processed meat products.

Genack maintained that kosher standards in the Latin American slaughterhouses are controlled by the Israeli Chief Rabbinate and practices at the plants are ultimately outside the purview of the O.U. Genack said that he had spoken with Yona Metzger, Israel’s chief Ashkenazi rabbi, about the Latin American plants as recently as this past summer.

A spokesman for Metzger, Avi Blumenthal, said that Metzger opposed shackle and hoist, but he could only request change and not enforce it, as the matter is “not connected to kashrut.”

Blumenthal claimed that the vast majority of glatt kosher beef shipped to Israel from Latin America came from plants using high-tech inverting pens, which flip the cows upside down and are considered more humane than the shackle and drag method. But Blumenthal’s claim puzzled Genack, who said that the O.U. is unaware of any inverting pens in use in Central or South America.

“I don’t understand what they’re referring to,” Genack said. The Israeli Chief Rabbinate’s kashrut authority certifies more slaughterhouses in Central and South America than the O.U., and Genack said it was possible that the inverting pens were being used in places where the O.U. had no presence. But he said, “If an [inverting pen] was in the slaughterhouses that we were at and they were using it, we’d be using it, as well.”

In fact, some progress appears to have been made. Genack said that a plant in Mexico which he would not name is now using the more humane upright pen for beef imported by Alle.

But according to Genack, that progress has not reached the Uruguayan and Costa Rican plants.

The Latin American cattle are grass fed, in contrast to grain-fed American cattle, and some argue that the Latin American animals have an overall better quality of life. But Naftali Hanau, founder and CEO of Grow and Behold, which sells pasture-raised beef and poultry from North American farms, said he isn’t so sure. “They arguably do have a better life than a typical American feedlot cow,” Hanau told the Forward. But “when you factor in the end of the line, when it comes to transportation and handling and being slaughtered through a system that is arguably more inhumane, it’s a question of values. Personally, I’m not going to buy that meat.”

Top Rabbi Pinto Aide Tied to Porn Sales and Legal Troubles

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