Bakery Waits Week After Sukkot To Make Sufganiyot, Loses Kosher Status (PreOccupied Territory)

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Jerusalem, November 7 - A confectionery and baked goods establishment in the nation's capital has been forced to forfeit certification that its products conform to Jewish dietary practice, after inspectors from the Rabbinate discovered the business had failed to start producing Hanukkah pastries right after Sukkot finished.

Uggat Hen, a bakery in the Mahane Yehuda market in central Jerusalem, was stripped of its kashrut certificate Tuesday morning after Jerusalem Rabbinate representatives ascertained that sufganiyot - the deep-fried, filled donuts associated with Hanukkah - only went up for sale there a full seven days after the October 11 conclusion of Sukkot  this year, while such establishments are expected to begin selling the pastries as soon as Sukkot ends. Hanukkah begins this year the night of Tuesday, December 12.

"This delay is unacceptable," stated Rabbi Amok Tiegen. "Protocol calls for consumers to encounter Hanukkah pastries in the bakeries as soon as Sukkot ends, so that not a single day is lost for commercializing and monetizing the Jewish calendar. In principle, the full two months between the end of Sukkot and the onset of Hanukkah must not be left fallow of such exploitation, though we acknowledge the difficulty of initiating sufganiyah production immediately at the close of Sukkot. We therefore allow a few days' leeway. In this case, however, the proprietors made no apparent effort to sell sufganiyot right away."

A bakery representative who requested not to be identified lamented the harsh ruling. "People are going to get sick of it by the time Hanukkah actually comes," he complained. "It's become a pathology. When I was a kid we never had to worry about this nonsense - as we got closer to Hanukkah more and more places would start selling sufganiyot, but it was organic, not mandated. The soul of it is gone."

Consumers voiced ambivalence. "I mean, rules are rules," responded passerby Zach Veyashar. "The bakery agreed to follow the rules. On the other hand, it's a little beyond the mandate of kashrut, isn't it? It's not as if the bakery people are withholding their monthly bribe payments to a supervisor not to make a thorough inspection. Unless, of course, that's really what happened here, and the sufganiyah thing is just a pretext."

"Let 'em close," declared Tiv Oni. "Their stuff isn't even organic, and sufganiyot are full of gluten. They probably use commercial oil too, not from free-range olives. Are they trying to kill people? Meat is murder! No more animal testing! What was the question again?"

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