The president of the Conference of European Rabbis has warned that the continent’s Jewish communities are facing a battle to protect shechita after a legal decision last month.
Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, who was visiting London this week for Book Week 24, told the JC, “We are going to have to fight now in the trenches in every country.”
His warning follows a ruling at the European Court of Human Rights that a ban on religious slaughter without pre-stunning imposed by two of Belgian’s three districts, Flanders and Wallonia, in 2019, did not infringe human rights.
The ban has meant that one of Europe’s most significant Orthodox communities, Antwerp, has had to import kosher meat for several years.