By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Tumbleweeds amble across the roads between the central Washington towns of Prosser and Sunnyside. Between the dusty desert scrub and the perfectly lined orchards and grape vines, this vast area known as the Yakima Valley can be a lonely place. Even more so during the fall harvest season when a minyan of Orthodox rabbis, most of them from the East Coast and as far away as Israel, checks into Sunnyside’s Best Western hotel and hunkers down for six or more weeks of constant hashgacha, supervision, ensuring the grape juice that consumers find on their store shelves over the next year will, in fact, be kosher.
The vast majority of concord grapes, the sweet varietal that makes up most of the bottled grape juice in this country, comes from the Yakima Valley. The containers of grape juice that show up on shelves of grocery stores across the country are the results of about six weeks of work every year.
The man in charge of this operation is Rabbi Yitzhak Gallor, a longtime Seattleite and the man responsible for ensuring that the products he and his team are supervising can halachically bear the Orthodox Union’s ubiquitous OU symbol.
Unlike other crops grown in the area such as apples or pears, where the machinery can get cleaned, checked, and certified kosher at the start of the harvest, grapes are a sacramental fruit with specific rules set forth in the Torah about how they can be handled. As a result, the making of juice, which for all intents and purposes is considered the same as wine, must have a mashgiach, a Sabbath-observant Jew, on hand 24 hours a day, seven days a week until the harvest and subsequent bottling is finished.
It means that even through the High Holidays — with the sweet essence of grape embedding itself in the clothes of these rabbis while they conduct their Yom Kippur fast — they are working and performing the same tasks they must perform on any other day.
Relatively speaking, ensuring kashrut for the apples at facilities such as Treetop, which as of this year is the largest kosher juice facility in the Yakima Valley, is a simple task. The rabbis generally only need to go in once to certify the equipment, and barring any unforeseen glitches, Gallor makes trips to the area every few weeks throughout the year to ensure compliance and to answer any questions.
With the grapes, however, the process is more painstaking — and mechanized — than some guy with hopefully clean feet jumping up and down in a barrel.
“I had images of Lucille Ball in a vat, but the scale is way too big,” said Rabbi Edward Shapiro, one of the mashgichim on contract with the OU who came in from Denver.
For one thing, unless the guy who would be doing the stomping — or who does the picking or any actual step in the juice-making process — is a Shabbat-observant Jew, the grapes must be pasteurized so they become mevushal, meaning they can be handled by non-Jews in any type of situation.
In kosher winemaking, the wine is flash heated to near boiling point — the OU uses 175ºF as a benchmark, though a buffer of 10º additional or more is general practice. For juice, however, the process is different. The grapes, pre-mashing, are continuously cycled through a series of heated tubes until they reach the set temperature, and are then released into a vat that can be as large as 60,000 gallons.
The mashgichim are charged with making sure the computer that sets the temperature is in working order, as well as the seismograph that puts the readings onto paper, which must then be signed by a rabbi on duty. They also check container labels and that any additives to the juice are kosher and properly labeled.
“People in New York want to know that the bottle of grape juice they put in front of their kids is kosher,” Shapiro said.
Being on-site at these factories means understanding how the juice is made and staying out of the way of the employees, many of whom are migrant workers.
“To be a good supervisor you have to know as much as the operators,” Gallor said.
The relationship between the rabbis and the workers and management at the grape processing facilities is congenial — if not outright friendly.
“A lot of people don’t see Jews,” Shapiro said, which means they must act as ambassadors for the entire religion. “It’s a big piece of being rabbis here.”
Much of the positive relationship is due to Rabbi Aharon Steinberg, who died in 2004 but initiated processes that would work for both kosher consumers and the people running the plants, including one in which the grapes would be made mevushal before they were mashed instead of after, as it had historically been done. What brought juice companies on board was that Steinberg’s idea retained more of the color and sugar content — both big money in the juice industry — if the heating took place before the grapes were mashed.
Steinberg then worked with the companies to build the heating systems, including at least two failsafe detectors and the seismic charts — he wanted to ensure that the big financial outlay by the factories would not result in work stoppages.
If a single grape that hasn’t been made mevushal gets through, workers must stop the line, segregate the tub, stop production and then rabbis must re-kosher the vats. It’s a big deal — and expensive — because it interrupts an already tight timeline and often results in juice that can’t be sent to market.
“If we get to that point, there’s really a problem,” Gallor said.
But the idea appears to have been successful: In a video Gallor created last year for new recruits to the harvest, the owner of one of the factories in the valley tearfully recalled the strong friendship he had had with Steinberg.
Despite the long, often boring hours, being a couple hundred miles from fresh kosher food, and even farther from their young families, Gallor said people line up to try to get one of the coveted mashgiach positions. Turnover, he said, is practically nil.
“They get paid pretty well,” Gallor said. “The ones that are learning, living off the dust of the earth, this is all their money all year.”
Rabbi Aaron Weitz, who followed his father into the supervision business and traveled from Israel for the job, said it’s difficult because he’s away from his family for the holidays, but it’s also satisfying for him.
“I build a relationship with the workers,” he said. “If there are problems, they let us know.”
Most of the workers are deeply religious, Weitz noted, and he said that one of the benefits of being at the plant is that they will on occasion talk about some personal issues they’re having because they have that common spiritual connection.
Still, Gallor said, being that far from home can be trying.
“Usually their wives are crying on the phone,” he said.
For Gallor, who is used to the long drives from Seattle and the sparse scenery, this work in Washington’s farmland is a reminder of how Jews used to live. The Jews are a people of the earth, and the calendar, and the festivals, and celebrating what God provides, and we forget about that, he said.
“It’s all about reconnecting,” he said. “It’s all about reconnecting.”