After spending several days stuffed in crates with no food or water, tens of thousands of chickens were swung in the air and slaughtered during the final night of Kaporos, the Yom Kippur ritual of transferring one’s sins to a live chicken.

Ritual practitioners line up to slaughter sin-filled chickens

Slaughter in the streets of Brooklyn

Following is a short video of the chaotic scene during the final hours of the ritual – the chickens, the butchers and the ritual practitioners debating the protesters.

In a bit of irony, a Mitzvah (good deed) mobile was parked near slaughter tent

Protesters clash with Kaporos practitioners

By and large, the practitioners cannot relate to the protesters’ concerns about the chickens

The 2014 Yom Kippur street protests are over, but the Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos will, throughout the year, continue its fight to outlaw this barbaric ritual. Because of its size and voting power, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community is very powerful, but, through legal strategies, outreach to sympathetic rabbis, public relations and education, the Alliance is convinced that the chickens will ultimately prevail.

In an interview with the local press, prominent NYC cardiologist Robert Ostfeld states that his patients are telling him that transitioning to a plant-based diet has improved their sex lives. The Harvard-trained doctor, who runs the Cardiac Wellness Program at Montefiore Hospital, says “Erectile disfunction may result from a clogged artery to the penis.” Only animal products contain artery-clogging cholesterol.

Dr. Ostfeld says that five of the 250 patients in his practice who have adopted a plant-based diet have volunteered that they’ve experienced “significant improvements to erectile dysfunction.” He suspects that the number is higher.

Dr. Robert Ostfeld (photo: The NY Blue Print)

When patients argue that a plant-based diet seems “extreme,” Dr. Ostfield says that the effects of eating cholesterol-laden animal protein are far more extreme: “I think it’s extreme when someone saws my chest open, takes a vein from my leg and stitches it into my heart.”

In the article, Dr. Ostfeld describes many other benefits of a plant-based diet, but its impact on sex is what likely led the media outlet to publish the story.

To learn more about the benefits of a plant-based diet, watch the award-winning documentary film Forks Over Knives, which “examines the profound claim that most, if not all, of the degenerative diseases that afflict us can be controlled, or even reversed, by rejecting animal-based and processed foods.” The trailer is chilling:

Most animal rights organizations and activists refrain from comparing animal atrocities to the Holocaust because the analogy alienates people, which could compromise its intent to effect positive change for the animals.

Over the years, PETA has been attacked in the press and online for producing Holocaust imagery that compares concentration camps to factory farms.

PETA’s Holocaust Campaign

In mid-September, Australian artist Jo Frederiks produced an exhibit with Holocaust imagery called The Animal Holocaust, which, she said, was inspired by quotations from concentration camp survivors and philosophers, such as Theodor Adorno who wrote “Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they are only animals.” Like PETA, Ms. Frederiks was criticized.

But what happens when a survivor invokes the Holocaust to generate attention for the billions of farm animals who are slaughtered each year? Is he above reproach?

Before being smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II, five year old Alex Hershaft saw Jews being beaten by Nazis in the streets. He lost most of his family during the war, but he gained empathy that helped him connect dots between the atrocities committed against humans and animals – and become one of the founders of the modern-day animal rights movement.

Holocaust Survivor Alex Hershaft

In 1976, Dr. Hershaft founded the organization that would eventually become the Farm Animal Rights Movement (FARM). In 1983, began an annual one-day fast on October 2nd as part of World Day for Farmed Animals. The fast aims to raise awareness of the plight of who are raised and killed for food. This year, about 10,000 people from 71 countries have pledged to join him.

Author Isaac Besheva Singer once said, “In their behavior toward creatures, all men are Nazis.” The cows who are branded with fire and baby pigs who are castrated with no painkillers would assuredly agree.

The animals’ perspective

Lawyers for the Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos filed an emergency order with the City of New York arguing that the swinging and slaughtering of tens of thousands of chickens in the street should be shut down because the ritual causes immediate, irreversible damage to public health and violates animal cruelty and sanitation laws. A judge is expected to issue a decision on Wednesday.

Following is a one minute video of the ritual taken on Tuesday, the first of three days of chicken swinging that lead up to Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement.

On Tuesday night, a few dozen activists clashed with hundreds of Orthodox Jews who were “transferring their sins” to live chickens while swinging them around their heads. The activists were contained in a pen and were surrounded by Kaporos practitioners who are always eager to debate.

Protesters & chicken swingers square off

This barbaric scene that takes place year after year is heart-breaking for activists, but the community has hope. Karen Davis, the founder of United Poultry Concerns and who traveled from Virginia to participate, says: “As more and more animal rights activists get involved, and with legal challenges in the works, many Orthodox rabbis are publicly condemning Kaporos on grounds of animal cruelty and sacrilege.”

Thousands of chickens will be held in crates for several day with no food or water

Animal rescuers, including Jenny Brown from the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary, were on hand to save as many chickens as possible and transport them to sanctuaries to live out their natural lives in the company of with hundreds of other farm animals who escaped from slaughter.

Woodstock tends to injured chicken rescued from Kaporos

Please sign the Change.org petition urging NYC to enforce the laws being broken by Kaporos practitioners.

Kaporos, the annual chicken-swinging ritual that takes place before Yom Kippur, doesn’t start until Tuesday night, but, already, an activist has been arrested, and hundreds of chickens stacked in crates on the street have died.

Activist Arrested (photo: Yeshiva World News)

Wearing a Mercy For Animals t-shirt, an activist from New Jersey was arrested on Monday for allegedly stealing chickens from a “Kaporos Center” in Brooklyn. Authorities found the liberated chickens in his vehicle. Sadly, these animals, who had a brief taste of freedom in the back of a van, will most likely be used in the Kaporos ritual and then slaughtered.

Liberated chickens are free no more (photo: Yeshiva World News)

In a separate incident, Brooklyn resident Rina Deych, a founding member of the advocacy group working to end the chicken-swinging ritual, made the grisly discovery of hundreds of dead chickens stacked in crates, and she took footage with the hope that authorities would charge the perpetrators with animal cruelty.

Ms. Deych suspects that the chickens, who are deprived of food and water for several days, died of dehydration: “We just witnessed hundreds, possibly thousands of chickens dead in crates in Brooklyn. We called the police, but they would not take our report. NYPD is supposed to respond to animal cruelty and neglect cases.”

Ms. Deych’s video documentation of dead and dying chickens:

If you live in or near NYC, please attend one or more of the three anti-chicken swinging protests organized by the Alliance to End Chickens for Kaporos. The protests take place from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. in Brooklyn, New York.