Emes Meat Shop Reopens, but Sales Are Dismal : Kosher: Owner Semion Rachshtut says the once- thriving store may be doomed. It closed in May after allegations of using non-kosher poultry.

The controversial Emes kosher meat store has reopened its doors, but owner Semion Rachshtut says that customers who once clamored for beef and poultry are staying away in droves despite a maverick rabbi’s blessing.

After a two-month layoff forced by the alleged discovery in his dumpster of an empty poultry box from a non-kosher supplier, Rachshtut went back into business three weeks ago at the shop on South La Cienega Boulevard.

But he despairs of surviving without the approval of the Rabbinical Council of California, which cancelled his kosher certification in May, the immigrant butcher said late last week, sobbing and clutching his chest.

“This is a dead person you want to raise. Only He can raise the dead,” Rachshtut said, pointing toward heaven.

His plight illustrates a growing demand among religiously observant Jews for strict enforcement of ancient dietary laws, spokesmen for the Rabbinical Council said. The council’s rabbis, numbering about 50, represent most of the strictly observant Orthodox Jews in Southern California.

But not all of Rachshtut’s clientele was scared off.

“I don’t believe for a second that those people did one thing wrong,” said Wendy Margolis, a nurse practitioner who drives in from Thousand Oaks to do her shopping at the freeway-close Emes store. There is a kosher butcher shop in her neighborhood, but it is too expensive, she said.

Rachshtut’s butcher shop and delicatessen was once one of the most popular kosher establishments in Los Angeles, but many Orthodox rabbis have told their parishioners not to shop there.

In the meantime, Rachshtut has obtained supervision from a newly formed agency called The Orthodox Rabbinical Assn., whose Hebrew name translates as the Students of the Committee of Pious Rabbis (the initials in both languages spell out the word Torah--the first five books of the Bible). So far, he is the agency’s only client.

As a result of the warnings from the Rabbinical Council, few of the old customers--who favored Emes for its neatly trimmed cuts, freshly made sausages and low prices--have come back, and he may be forced to close again, this time for good, Rachshtut said.

The relationship between observant Jews and their butchers depends on trust, “and the proprietors of Emes have lost that trust in this community,” said Rabbi Binyomin Lisbon, administrator of the Rabbinical Council’s kosher enforcement program.

“There are second chances in a lot of areas of Jewish life, but not in selling kosher meat,” he said. It would be hard, if not impossible, for a layman to detect the substitution of cheaper, non-kosher cuts for the genuine articles.

Despite that, the rabbi of the synagogue where Rachshtut prays urged that he be allowed to go back in business for the sake of his family. At the age of 50, he knows no other trade, said Rabbi Joshua Gordon of the Chabad of the Valley congregation in Encino.

“To the best of my knowledge, the man has not been convicted of any wrongdoing,” said Gordon. The rabbi stressed that neither he nor the Chabad organization, which has several congregations in Southern California, was endorsing the Emes store or the agency that granted its new kosher certificate.

“He’s a Russian Jew who has suffered a lot, and my philosophy in life is that I’ve tried to help anybody I can as long as it doesn’t conflict with the principles of Jewish law,” Gordon said.

There may be a way out for Rachshtut, said Rabbi Joshua Berkowitz, chairman of the kosher enforcement committee of the Rabbinical Council, whose members include most of the Orthodox rabbis in Southern California.

Berkowitz said that the council has received “feelers” about a possible restoration of its supervision, but that certain conditions would have to be met, including a change of name and ownership.

Rachshtut and his wife, Ella, who works behind the counter, could only be salaried employees, he said.

Several butchers around town have been approached about such an arrangement, but the efforts did not bear fruit, according to Rabbi Yale Butler, publisher of the B’nai B’rith Messenger weekly newspaper.

“In each case, community pressure made the parties back out at the last moment,” Butler said in his Kosher Konsumer column.

But one of them, Moshe Kagan, owner of the Western Kosher store on Fairfax Avenue, said that a deal might still be possible.

“If he made (another) such an approach to me, and it it was acceptable to all parties concerned, I would not be against such a thing,” Kagan said.

For his part, Rachshtut said he was “ready, ready, ready” to give up the ownership of his store, “but only if I have a place (to work), because I have a family.”

His new kashrut agency, TORA, is a creation of Rabbi I. Harold Sharfman, who is also the rabbinic administrator of Kosher Overseers Assn. of America Inc., which provides kosher supervision for several large food processing plants across the country and abroad.

“I did it not for money, but out of empathy, sympathy and compassion,” said Sharfman, adding that he hopes the Rabbinical Council will restore its supervision of Rachshtut’s store.

“He’s certainly suffered tremendously,” Sharfman said. He said that he assigned a full-time inspector to work with Rachshtut and even went so far as to lock up Emes’ dumpster with a padlock to ensure a high level of supervision.

“I don’t know of any place that can be considered more kosher than this one,” he said.

Sharfman, who holds three degrees from the Orthodox movement’s Yeshiva University in New York, is not a member of the Rabbinical Council, although he shows visitors a photograph of himself among the founding members of the organization in 1949.

Once the head of a synagogue that his father established on Robertson Boulevard, the longhaired, gray-bearded Sharfman acknowledged that he does not have much to do with the organized Jewish community in Los Angeles.

“I’m traveling most of the time. This is a type of life that is not common to most rabbis,” he said.

Prof. Joe Regenstein, a food scientist specializing in kosher issues at Cornell University in Ithaca, N. Y., said that Sharfman is “certainly a scholar” but that his agency’s supervision is considered to be “clearly controversial.”

Although firms including Campbell Soup, Treetop, Knott’s Berry Farm and Dole use the “crescent-K” of his Kosher Overseers Assn., mainline Orthodox groups tend to disagree with Sharfman on details of kosher observance, Regenstein said.

“He has a viewpoint that may not coincide with other rabbis, but it’s still within the realm of the acceptable,” he said.