With the eight-day holiday of Passover practically around the corner, rabbis at OU Kosher are preparing for thousands of questions from Jews around the world.
Along with the OU Kosher hotline, fielded by Rabbi Zvi Nussbaum, the Orthodox Union says its rabbinic coordinator, Rabbi Chanoch Sofer (also known as the “Webbe Rebbe”), is poised to address more than 3,000 Passover-themed questions expected to arrive via email.
“Everybody thinks that we’re super-busy now with Pesach,” Rabbi Moshe Elefant, chief operating officer of OU Kosher, told JNS. “What we’re really busy with is answering questions. We’re not manufacturing anything for Pesach now.”
In fact, he said, “we are already preparing for next year. Everything that’s for Pesach was made months ago.”
The OU maintains a year-round system for consumer inquiries, noting it has two rabbis who work full-time, year-round, answering questions. These inquiries range from whether bottled water needs a kosher-for-Passover label to what food Jews can give pets.
When it comes to online grocery orders, which are becoming more common, Elefant offered a practical warning: Always verify the certification on the physical product once it arrives instead of simply relying on the image shown online.
“That assumption is a big, big, big mistake,” he said, noting that consumers should also check labels in stores. He recounted a case when someone bought large quantities of gefilte fish from a display only to discover that it was not kosher-for-Passover.
Elefant also pointed to the OU Kosher app as an additional resource: “You just have to put your phone on the barcode, and it’ll come up. Before we know it, it’ll tell you where you can get it the cheapest.”
“It’s incredible; they don’t need us for that,” he said. “But how do you manage these human relationships? The app can’t answer that. Otherwise, we’d be completely replaceable.”
Despite the stress that accompanies preparation ahead of the holiday, Elefant told JNS that the thousands of questions every year reflect something positive.
“When you get that amount of calls, thousands of calls every day, that means there are thousands of people that care,” he said. “Kosher is so much part of their lives, and they want to be 100% sure that everything that they’re eating and they’re serving is kosher.”
