Sparkling Passover Issue
A New Scroll of LA Jewish News
Folks,
Being ready and prepared for Passover in a time like ours is not an easy thing. The seder calls for order, and our lives have been everything but orderly. The haggadah asks a lot of questions, and we already have too many. The meal brings memories of flavors we have lost, or no longer choose to afford. Yet, as we raise the first glass of wine and sing Hineni muchan umzumon, Here I am ready and prepared, somehow, we manage to hit the mark. We work the events and feelings of our time into the order. We use the time to ask new questions. We search out the old recipes and flavor them with our experience. All around the world we do this with our families and friends as we literally rise to open the door to our story and our imaginations. Yes, Passover can a be a flat square thing with which we want to fill a large round void, but we make it work anyway.
On Passover, it’s a custom to buy new clothes. Instead, I am asking you to do something that requires no trip to a store, or an hour of searching online: buy a new subscription to MegilLA, or renew your old one. As we sit at this unique table, I need your support to bring us to the next holiday. Please subscribe below.
Shabbat shalom and chag sameach.
Edmon J. Rodman
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DID THE KOSHER PASSOVER DRINK ORIGINATE IN LA?
Things go kosher with Coke
Ad from April 1933 B'nai B'rith Messenger.
Edmon J. Rodman
When there was a shortage of Passover Coke in California in 2012, there was panic in J-land. During the eight-day holiday, both kosher-keepers and those who just loved the soda for its no-corn-syrup taste, wondered what they would drink to quench their bubbly habit.
The scarcity, resulting from a small change in the Coca-Cola formula that caused all variations of the drink to be barred from California due to a change in the state’s toxic chemical laws, caused devotees to drive from store to store, searching for a “Kosher for Passover” yellow-capped fix. Saving the holiday, almost too late, retailers finally figured out how to ship in liters from other states.
This Passover, you can (discretely) give a burp of relief, that even with the supply-chain shortages of other necessities, Passover Coke is in good supply.
According to various sources, including Time magazine, Coca-Cola first became kosher for Passover in 1935. Yet, challenging that account, MegilLA has found, two years before, in 1933, a Los Angeles rabbi had also declared a special run of Coke “Kosher for Passover.”
In the well-documented history, the careful investigation of Tuvia Geffen, a Lithuanian-born rabbi who lived in Atlanta, Coca-Cola’s home, is given credit for this sparkling achievement.
Rabbi Geffen had noticed that among his Orthodox congregants Coke was popular. Other Orthodox rabbis had seen that too, and asked him to look into whether if it was kosher during the year and on Passover. Knowing that “It is not only very difficult to sanction the drinking of Coca-Cola throughout the year, but it is even more difficult to do so for Passover,” Rabbi Geffen wrote,” his investigation began.
With the aid of Coca-Cola, who required he not reveal the product’s ingredients, Rabbi Geffen found two components that rendered the product not kosher: a trace of a substance he called “Moris,” or “M,” which was glycerin, a “liquid product made from meat and fat tallow of non-kosher animals,” and another he called “Amigron” or “A,” made from grain kernels. (Today, the main issue with Coke and other soft drinks on Passover is the use of corn-based sweeteners which had not come into wide usage in the 1930s.)
As a solution, he suggested that for year-round use, even though it was only found in minute quantities, M could “be prepared from plant oil,” like cottonseed, and for Passover, when chametz was forbidden, “A” could be made from cane or beet sugar.
Acting on his advice, Coca-Cola made the changes in their year-round and Passover formulas.
To his credit, Coca-Cola’s acceptance of Rabbi Geffen’s halachic, and chemistry-based analysis set a precedent for corporate America, and for all rabbis charged with determining a food substance’s kosher status.
However, new information has bubbled up.
In 1932, Isaac Essrig, a Los Angeles rabbi, spiritual leader of Congregation Beth Israel (see story below in Seen On the Way), had already declared in an ad in the B'nai B'rith Messenger his supervision of a special run of "Kosher for Passover" Coca-Cola.
In this fizzy mystery of “firsts,” he was not alone.
Another rabbi, S.I. Levin of Minnesota had been running ads for “Passover Coca-Coca” in the American Jewish World as early as 1927.
How could this be?
Rabbi Essrig, who was born in Palestine in 1893, was careful and committed to his mission. In his 1932 book, “Fountain of Wisdom, a “how to” on living a Jewish life, he declared that in preparation for Passover “Everything should be cleaned and renewed and made as kosher as possible.”
Then as well as now, Orthodox rabbis could make their own rulings on whether a product is kosher, or even supervise making a product so, and clearly, that is what happened.
Most likely is that Rabbi Essrig saw the bottling of Passover Coke as similar to the production of other processed and bottled kosher for Passover liquids like milk, a steam cleaning and inspection process with which Rabbi Essrig was familiar since he had provided the Passover rabbinic supervision for a local milk company in 1926.
It is also possible that Coca-Cola in Atlanta had already known about “M” and “A” before Rabbi Geffen had come into the picture. Companies are always looking for ways to retain market share, and a rabbi consultant could have been brought in to see about creating a kosher for Passover Coke.
Story from April 1933 B'nai B'rith Messenger.
Supporting this possibility, is a short news piece that ran in the same issue as the ad said that the “Coca Cola Bottling Company, the Southern California Bottlers and distributors” had “gone to a special expense and trouble,” to provide Southland Jewish families with Coke that was “pesachdik.”
It may have also been that Rabbis Essrig somehow knew about “M” and “A” and had Coca-Cola adjust their formula. Or, perhaps his own ingredient analysis just didn’t detect them, and he knew from the local bottler that a corn-based sweetener was not being used.
Regardless of how Rabbi Essrig made his ruling, Coca-Cola must have been watching, and when Rabbi Geffen came calling two years later, they were ready.
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Kosher for Passover Coke had local competition
In 1946, Abe Kanner, long-time Los Angeles bottler, came up with the idea for a kosher for Passover wine spritzer. In this ad which appeared in the B’nai B'rith Messenger, he suggested mixing his Wilshire Club club soda and wine for “a delicious, sparkling wine drink.” However good this mix, he did not suggest offering it to Elijah.
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Over 100 have attended LA Jewish walk
The lights of LA's Jewish past will spark to life on The Jewish Lights Over Broadway Walking Tour Sunday, April 24, 7 to 9 p.m. (MAKE RESERVATIONS HERE). The 1.5 mile round trip walk, with a snack break at the Grand Central Market, creates an environment where participants can connect with the Jewish personalities who helped to create LA.
Over 120 people have attended, with many making new connections to an area of LA that they had not previously visited, and others reconnecting with the once-familiar landscape of downtown.
Over the last year, I have been researching this little-known story, walking the street, collecting artifacts that we will show on the tour like a trumpet from Platt Music, and a wooden chocolate box from Hamburger's department store, that help participants get a feel for the Jewish life that once flourished there.
The tour, organized with the Museum of Neon Art in Glendale, illuminates how the Jewish entrepreneurs of Broadway, many of them immigrants, filled the street with bright lights, and the city’s homes with music, the latest in fashion, and the staples required to satisfy a hungry, growing city.
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Yom Ha'Tax is almost here
Silver half shekel used for paying the Temple tax
How Jewish is tax time?
Unlike Jewish holidays, for this year's Federal income tax filing deadline on April 18, there are no feasts, that is, unless you expect a big refund. No fasts, unless you need to cut back after writing a check to the IRS. No search for crumbs, unless you are scrambling last minute for receipts. Yet, our tax deductions can help to keep the doors of our Jewish institutions open.
There are no special Torah readings for Yom Ha'Tax, however, as described in Exodus, the collection of the half shekel, a flat tax, from those 20 and over, pays the costs “of the tent of meeting.”
If you are still looking for a Jewish connection to tax time, remember that Henry and Richard Bloch, two nice Jewish boys from Kansas City began their business in 1955 by filling out tax forms for a fee of only five bucks.
Do you favor a regressive tax? A progressive tax? Examples of each are found in our writings, and in the 19th century, a progressive or graduated income tax is one of the 10 points of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.
Before you get all red on me—people who feel taxes should be way lower—even non-existent, are Jewish too. Author Ayn Rand, Nobel Prize winning economist Ludwig Von Mises, and Revisionist Zionist Ze-ev Jabotinsky, all espoused libertarian beliefs.
Does Jewish law even obligate us to pay? Though I am not a tax attorney, if you consult the Talmud you will find there is no way out: “The law of the land is law,” it says, even if writing the check, like maror, brings on a few bitter tears.
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Seen On the Way: Beverly Grove
Photo Pini Herman
One of the Beverly Grove area’s older remaining Jewish institutions was demolished this week. Making an Exodus was the building that was home to Congregation Beth Israel at 8056 Beverly Boulevard. An Orthodox congregation, it was founded around 1900, and in 1953 moved from its onion-domed building on Olive Street (known as the Olive Street Shul) to a remodeled movie theater (Laurel). On the day of the temple’s dedication, Rosalind Wiener, at the time the youngest person at age 22 elected to the L.A. City Council, as well as the first Jewish woman to hold a seat on that body, gave a speech. Also speaking was Beth Israel’s president, Joseph M. Wapner, the father of Joseph A. Wapner, a municipal court judge and more famously the judge of TV’s “The People's Court.” In the mid 1970’s, Beth Israel was led by Rabbi Samuel Lieberman and Cantor Hershel Walfish, who at the congregation’s seders was sometimes assisted by his son Steven.
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