Injury Led to Media Finding

By SHLACHTER & CO, Star-Telegram

http://www.star-telegram.com/2010/06/02/v-print/2235194/beltex-goes-kosher-with-beef-processing.html

Only in Fort Worth.

If an Orthodox rabbi hadn’t been injured at the Beltex packing plant on the north side last month, we might never have learned that the former horse slaughterhouse that already did a roaring business in wild pig, bison and ostrich now also processes kosher beef.

Beltex’s Frontier Meats operation contracts with Alle Processing Corp. of Maspeth, N.Y., supplying steers to be processed by Big Apple-based ritual slaughterers, known as shochetim, under the supervision of rabbis, including him, said Rabbi Dov Mandel, co-director with his wife of the Orthodox Lubavitch movement’s Chabad House in Fort Worth.

Mandel said that while an initial report said a worker’s arm had been amputated, the injured man is a rabbi whose arm was broken, not severed.

We got further details from Jeri Finkelstein, a Dallas friend of the injured rabbi, whom she identified as Peretz Shapiro, a British-born Chabad rabbi who lives in north Dallas. His arm was badly crushed and he underwent a second round of surgery this week, she said.

No one from Beltex returned our calls. The Dutch-Belgian enterprise, under the gun for years from animal-rights activists over its past horse meat exports, doesn’t exactly embrace the news media. (One of us waited a decade to be let in, only to be shown an empty building between shifts. It has no named spokesman and when the company comments, it’s by unsigned e-mail.)

Mandel said there’s no problem that the plant might have processed boar the day before, because it’s carefully cleaned before cattle are brought in.

Most of the kosher beef from Fort Worth is shipped to New York, where it is sold as fresh and frozen cuts. But some is diverted to the Tom Thumb supermarket at Coit and Campbell roads in north Dallas, which has a kosher meat counter, the rabbi said.