Beef Strike

As even moderately well-informed vegetarians know, the price of beef is currently sky-high (TIME, Oct. 4). Higher still--by about 1-c- per Ib.--is kosher beef, which must be butchered sacrificially, handled ceremoniously. Last fortnight 5,000 New York City kosher butchers--who for months have had the unpleasant job of asking Jewish housewives to pay $1.35 for cuts which last year cost $1 -- shut up shop, noisily announced they would not reopen until meat prices were down.

Picket lines of portly butchers were promptly swung around kosher shops which refused to close, bringing on as lusty a brawling as in any A. F. of L.C. I. O. fracas. A plea to reopen from their president and from now on the Commissioner of Markets was met in open mass meetings with a loud Yiddish NO! Ignoring the law of supply & demand, which was working with textbook simplicity as a result of Drought and Government curtailment, the butchers howled that they were the victims of a packers' monopoly.

Finally Rabbi Joseph Konvitz, head of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the U. S. & Canada, sternly urged the strikers to re-open "for spiritual as well as economic reasons." He feared that Jewish housewives would soon be tempted to buy nonkosher meat. After holding out a full week and having wrung promises of investigation from both city and Federal agencies, the butchers unlocked their shops--with steaks down from 2-c- to 5-c- per Ib.

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