Rabbi Alexander Rosenberg
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Rabbi Berel Wein was Rabbi Rosenberg’s immediate successor as Rabbinic Administrator of the OU. In the midst of the Arab oil boycott of the West in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, 1974, one of the two main suppliers of Kosher glycerin in the United States, an OU supervised company, called me in a panic. All their labels were printed with the OU Kosher logo but they could not get any Kosher glycerin. I called the other supplier of kosher glycerin and explained the situation to the vice-president in charge of marketing. I asked him to help. He thought it over for a moment and then agreed to do so, adding that the glycerin would be billed at the price schedule used for regular customers. He then asked me: “Rabbi, do you think that Rabbi Rosenberg in heaven knows what I am doing for you?” This hard-nosed, non-Jewish businessman had no doubts that Rabbi Rosenberg is in heaven! Well, neither do I. On behalf of all us millions who find Kosher food so readily and plentifully available, thank you, Rabbi Rosenberg. |
Reb Moshe Feinstien wrote - "I well remember the great Gaon Rabbi Rosenberg. He stood at the helm of the organisation of rabbis providing Kosher supervision, and he declared that communal agencies providing Kosher certification must be fully financially independent before being able to legitimately claim any advantage over individual kosher agencies. [unfortunately he was not able to implement this] If a communal agency receives any payments whatsoever from the establishments they are servicing, even if only to defray the costs of the Mashgichim (supervisors), then they offer no advantage over the individual Rabbonim who are providing similar services." |
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Rabbi Berel Wein original Rabbi Alexander Rosenberg, though he may still be remembered by the older generation of rabbis in this country and Israel, is at best a half-sung hero. And that is probably exactly the way he would have wanted it to be. The Achilles’ heel of the Orthodox rabbinate in America in the first six decades of intensive Jewish immigration to America was Kashrus supervision. The chaos and crime that surrounded Kashrus matters is almost indescribable. The great Rabbi Yakov Yosef, who was elected as the first and the only Chief Rabbi of New York, was hounded to his premature death in 1902 by the conflicting forces battling for control of Kosher food supplies in New York. The Kashrus industry was firmly controlled by those who were interested in its profitability. The kashrut industry was also infiltrated by corrupt labor-union bosses and even by the capos of organized crime. There were individual rabbis who struggled heroically in their communities and neighbourhoods to uphold the standards of Kashrus, but for many it was a bruising and eventually losing battle. At the root of this problem was the fact that the rabbis had no power since they were not organised into a union that could undertake to enforce and popularize a program of intensive Kashrut supervision that would be free from the individual’s need for personal profit and the pressure of the food manufacturers and purveyors for lowered standards of supervision. The abysmally low salaries paid to American rabbis of the time, forced many otherwise great and honourable people into positions of silence and compromise. The Orthodox Union began to deal with this problem, but it was not until the advent of Rabbi Alexander Rosenberg as the Rabbinic Kashrut Administrator of the OU that real progress was made in this field. Rabbi Rosenberg, descended from a distinguished family of Hungarian rabbis, combined within himself old-world charm, a shrewd understanding of people and their true motives, an uncanny business sense, unimpeachable integrity, enormous compassion for individuals and a sense of public service that always allowed him to see the big picture and not just the narrow case in front of him. Rabbi Rosenberg was an accomplished Talmid Chacham, someone who knew when and with whom to consult on matters of Halacha and policy, and was the epitome of efficiency and rectitude in all of his dealings. But his greatest accomplishment was that wherever he went and with whomever he dealt, the experience always turned into a Kiddush HaShem. Rabbi Rosenberg envisioned the day, which has arrived, where a Jew could walk into almost any supermarket in North America and purchase Kosher food. He would not allow compromises in Kosher standards and yet unfailingly understood the problems that many manufacturers of prepared food products had in meeting those standards. He always said to the managers of the food plants that were under OU supervision: “We are here to help you. We are not the problem, rather we are here to provide you with the solution.” Many a product today is certified as Kosher due to Rabbi Rosenberg’s innovative spirit, quiet diplomacy and iron will. It was he who perfected and pioneered the system of the mass slaughtering of kosher poultry that, with further technological improvements and refinements, is de rigueur throughout the Jewish world today. Rabbi Rosenberg's aristocratic manner, his handsome appearance and immaculate dress, his integrity, his wisdom and his faith that most impressed these non-Jewish concerns and won them over to allow “rabbis to bless their machinery” and control their inventories and suppliers. Rabbi Rosenberg possessed enormous patience, forgave the personal slights cast upon him by spiteful and jealous people, and always looked for opportunities to help others. Rabbi Rosenberg was a rabbinic representative to the Displaced Persons camps in Germany after World War II. There he was seen as a delivering angel, especially to the surviving rabbis and Chasidic leaders. When many of them arrived in America a few years later, Rabbi Rosenberg helped them become established by providing advice, money (he was notorious for being overly generous with regard to charity), jobs and personal encouragement. He would go to Williamsburgh and Boro Park in Brooklyn in the 1960’s on Chol HaMoed and just stand there, watching the baby carriages, the holiday clothes, the parading generation after the Holocaust, smiling through his tears. It is no exaggeration to say that the basis for the many “chassidishe hechsherim” which exist today was laid by Rabbi Rosenberg. That is also true for many other current successful “private” Kosher organisations, who then and still today, rely on the OU for the basic raw materials for “their” products. Rabbi Rosenberg was magnanimous and generous to a fault, and if he felt that helping someone else’s efforts and organization would aid the cause of authentic Kashrus he would supply the necessary outside advice, judgement and experience. I will conclude this assessment of Rabbi Rosenberg with the following tale: I was Rabbi Rosenberg’s immediate successor as Rabbinic Administrator of the OU. In 1974, in the midst of the Arab oil boycott of the West in the wake of the Yom Kippur War (remember those good old days?) one of the two main suppliers of Kosher glycerin in the United States, an OU supervised company, called me in a panic. All their labels were printed with the OU Kosher logo but they could not get any Kosher glycerin. I called the other supplier of kosher glycerin and explained the situation to the vice-president in charge of marketing. I asked him to help. He thought it over for a moment and then agreed to do so, adding that the glycerin would be billed at the price schedule used for regular customers. He then asked me: “Rabbi, do you think that Rabbi Rosenberg in heaven knows what I am doing for you?” This hard-nosed, non-Jewish businessman had no doubts that Rabbi Rosenberg is in heaven! Well, neither do I. On behalf of all us millions who find Kosher food so readily and plentifully available, thank you, Rabbi Rosenberg. I called the other supplier of kosher glycerin and explained the situation to the vice-president in charge of marketing. I asked him to sell a number of tank cars of glycerin to this company, even though it was not a regular customer. The vice-president thought it over for a moment and then agreed to do so and told me that the glycerin would be billed at the price schedule used for regular customers. He then asked me: “Rabbi, do you think that Rabbi Rosenberg in heaven knows what I am doing for you?” This hard-nosed, non-Jewish businessman had no doubts that Rabbi Rosenberg is in heaven! Well, neither do I. On behalf of all us millions who find Kosher food so readily and plentifully available, thank you, Rabbi Rosenberg. |
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The Guru of Kashrut original by Timothy D. Lytton Rabbi Alexander S. Rosenberg Transformer of Kosher Certification in America Rabbi Alexander Rosenberg, rabbinic administrator of the OU Kosher Division from 1950 to 1972, was a seminal figure in shaping the US Kashrut system. In 1925, the New York City Department of Markets estimated that 40 percent of the meat sold in the city as kosher was actually Treif. Industry associations and consumer groups thought the true figure was between 50 and 65 percent. Organized crime dominated Kashrut. In perhaps the most notorious example, the Live Poultry Commission Merchants’ Protective Association operated a price-fixing scheme and distribution racket that dominated New York City’s Kosher chicken trade from 1906 to 1911. Local butchers who refused to knuckle under would find stores set up next door to undersell them and drive them out of business. In some cases, nonconforming butchers suffered physical violence. Finally, a store owner named Bernard Baff testified against the association in a trial that put an end to the association’s illegal activities and landed its leaders in prison. Following the trial, Baff’s horse and chickens were poisoned, his summer cottage and one of his stores were bombed and he was gunned down in broad daylight in Manhattan’s Washington Market by unknown assailants, who fled in a getaway car. Suspicions, of course, focused on the defunct Live Poultry Commission Merchants’ Protective Association. However, it turned out that the murder was arranged not by the imprisoned gangsters, but by a group of one hundred ordinary poultry retailers who resented Baff’s successful efforts after the trial to take over New York City’s poultry distribution. The problems of fraud and corruption in Kashrut proved too big for even the government to handle. Six full-time kosher inspectors in the New York City Department of Markets and ten in the New York State Kosher Enforcement Bureau were insufficient to oversee the 18,000 kosher food establishments in New York City by the late 1930s. Reform finally came with the rise of a new institution: the independent private Kosher certification agency. And no one did more to shape the modern Kashrut system than Rabbi Alexander S. Rosenberg, rabbinic administrator of the OU Kosher Division from 1950 to 1972. Rabbi Rosenberg believed passionately in the importance of making kosher food widely and easily available. At the end of World War II, he had been attached to the US Army in Germany, where he successfully advocated and established Kosher meat slaughter for Jewish survivors in displaced persons’ camps. Rabbi Rosenberg’s ambition was rooted in his religious faith. In the words of Rabbi Berel Wein, his deputy at the OU, Rabbi Rosenberg “was always working for Gd . . . he was working for the Jewish people.” The OU Kosher Division, founded in the mid-1920s, employed about forty Mashgichim to certify 184 products for thirty-seven companies, when Rabbi Rosenberg took charge of it. By the end of Rabbi Rosenberg’s tenure, the OU employed more than 750 Mashgichim to certify more than 2,500 products for 475 companies. Rabbi Rosenberg was a handsome man with an aristocratic bearing and a charming manner. His passionate commitment to making Kosher-certified food available in every supermarket in America earned him a reputation among food-industry executives as the “guru” of Kosher marketing. He cultivated personal relationships with key executives, coaching them on marketing strategy and even, on occasion, providing counselling on personal matters. And they believed in him—“like a Chassid believes in his Rebbe,” according to Rabbi Wein. Rabbi Rosenberg explained to food company executives that Kosher consumers were a small but highly influential demographic because they were concentrated disproportionately in major metropolitan markets, such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. By increasing a company’s share in those major markets, the company’s products would achieve better positioning on store shelves, where all consumers, not just Kosher consumers, would be more likely to see and buy them. According to Rabbi Wein, a marketing manager at Duncan Hines recalls that Rabbi Rosenberg taught him that “the whole grocery business depends on shelf space.” As a result of OU certification, sales of the company’s cake mix to kosher consumers in key urban markets increased, leading to more prominent placement on grocery shelves, so that sales among ordinary consumers rose dramatically—more than 40 percent in two months. Reduction in fraud and corruption resulted from the increased focus on dairy and Pareve packaged foods which, unlike meat, require much less supervision and therefore little, if any, mark-up in price. Since Kosher-certified cake mix costs no more than uncertified cake mix, there is less incentive to intentionally defraud consumers. The complexity and high volume of industrial food production, however, increased the risk of mistakes. Rabbi Rosenberg instituted reforms that reduced the risk of mistakes and counteracted any remaining incentives to intentionally defraud consumers. Rabbi Rosenberg hired full-time professional staff, set high uniform standards for supervision throughout the country and made sure that local rabbis working for the OU conformed to them. To reduce the conflict of interest that resulted when Mashgichim were paid by the companies whose products they certified, Rabbi Rosenberg insisted that company clients pay the OU, which would then pay Mashgichim. In addition, to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, Rabbi Rosenberg forbade Mashgichim from accepting any gifts from clients. He believed that the OU’s real interest lay not in pleasing any particular company by reducing its demands on them, but rather in building a reputation for reliability that would increase the value of the OU brand. In sum, Rabbi Rosenberg transformed the OU and established the foundation of the modern industrial Kashrut system by professionalizing supervision and instituting new management controls. His foresight and efforts promoted a dramatic change to US Kashrut standards and reliability. |
