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Fowl

Play

Jews of all stripes came to "shlugg kapores"
last week in preparation for Yom Kippur.

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JULIE EDGAR
Senior Writer

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C

hicken feathers and autumn
leaves danced in the air last •
week outside Bais Chabad in
Farmington Hills as hun-
dreds of Jews participated in the
ancient, noisy and odiferous pre-Yom
Kippur ritual known as kapores. .
The scene was not for the weak of •-4
stomach, but then imagine what the
al
Temple was like in ancient times, a par-
ticipant pointed out.
Hundreds of white chickens, after
being slung over hundreds of heads,
went to their deaths at a makeshift
slaughterhouse out back, where a
shochet expertly slit their throats and
Thr
ew them in a barrel. The birds were ei
then boxed and taken to Superior
Kosher Meats in Oak Park for butcher- Ill
ing. Sometime soon, they'll be feeding
students at the Lubavitcher yeshiva in
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Oak Park.
Kapores, despite its primitive quality,
is not animal sacrifice. Rather, the
chicken is a surrogate for the man, the
symbolic repositorz of an individual's
wrongdoings as the Day of Atonement II*
el
approaches.
"What's happening to the chicken
should be happening to us," explained
Rabbi Herschel Finman, who organizes
the annual event with Rabbi Chaim
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Bergstein of Bais Chabad.
"We see sin as extraneous to the per-
son, not endemic to the soul of a per-
son, and therefore the act of repentance IF.
is seen as wiping off some foreign sub- •
stance," Bergstein said.
The chickens are raised by an acade-
mician who has a Ph.D. in agriculture.
Bergstein orders 500 or so birds for the
estimated 1,000 people who attend the e
event each year.
On the night before Yom Kippur
eve, Finman stood behind a table in
street clothes hawking chickens, which 4
were stuffed in stacked crates behind 111
him. People of all sizes clustered
around the table. Squawking and pray-
ing completed the circus-like atmos-
phere.
Howie Schwartz, a member of
Temple Israel, brought his family to
kapores, which literally translates as
"atonement." Last year was his first
time.

Top: Rabbi S.A. Deutsch recites the
kapores prayer.

Far left: The shochet, or ritual slaugh-
terer, at work.

Left: Rabbi S.A. Deutsch (right) helps
out Israel Shafer with the kapores prayer.

10/17
1997

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