The “Salon de l’Agriculture” (Agricultural annual fair in Paris) opened its doors this week. Veals, cows and pigs are exhibited there with great enthusiasm. This is an opportunity for Danny Trom to review the book – a best seller in France since its publication – by radio anchor and journalist Sonia Devillers, Les Exportés (Flammarion, 2022 – [The Exported], yet to be translated), since it reminds us that Romanian Jews were massacred like animals, in an artisanal way, by the henchmen of Marshal Antonescu, with the help of a part of the local population, who together turned Romania in 1941 into an open-air butchery. He also tells us that after the war, because Romania remained a Mecca of the meat industry, the surviving Jews were traded for cattle; calves, cows and pigs. “The Jews and oil are our best export products,” Nicolas Ceausescu once said. It was as goods that Sonia Devillers’ family was valued and sold abroad, leaving communist Romania in 1961.
And since we are already talking about meat this week, we republish the text of the Israeli jurist Shai Lavi who came back to the question of the ban on ritual slaughter as it has arisen for Jews in Europe. As it has arisen in the past and as it is returning today: the obligation of stunning prior to slaughter is now a demand of the animalist parties and of many European environmentalist parties. However, arguing for attention to animal welfare, it is incidentally confronted with the rules of Jewish and Muslim ritual slaughter. Shai Lavi reminds us in this text how traditional authorities have been able to react to past bans by being attentive to their context and the intentions that motivated them.
