Tag #106676 - Interview #88491 (Emanuel Elbinger)

We had a 100 percent kosher kitchen. Not far from Nowe Brzesko is Hebdow [approx. 2 km from Nowe Brzesko], and there there was a manor [1149-1818 Norbertine monastery; after the dissolution of the Hebdow order the property was taken over by the State Treasury; from 1949 a Piarist monastery]. We bought supposedly kosher milk from there. Kosher in the sense that it was in clean vessels, right, because milk is kosher anyway, only it mustn’t be in the same vessels that have had meat in them. I think the Jews had an agreement with the manor dairy to ensure that the milk was clean. There was one Jew from Nowe Brzesko who got whole cans of milk from the manor, carried them into town, and you could buy from him. They were cans the lids of which were also liter measures. Yes, he poured it into the lid and that was a liter of milk. Then you poured it into your own pan. That’s how it was sold.

The Jews have ritual slaughter. I used to take the chicken to the butcher myself – in our house we always bought a chicken for Saturday. You didn’t eat meat all week, perhaps some cold cuts or something, but other than that we lived very frugally, because before the war meat was a luxury. I used to take a live chicken, because it wasn’t allowed any other way, and he – a specialist at it – one second, and… he cut its throat in a special way, so it bled out entirely. The thing was to kill the animal without suffering, as they say [Heb.: shechitah, the ritual slaughter of animals and birds].