Kapparot in Jerusalem

My wife and I walked northwards across Jerusalem’s Jaffa Road just as Shabbat ended. It was the last Saturday before Yom Kippur, and we were out to find kapparot. This ritual involves the recitation of prayers as one swings a live chicken around one’s head. As this is done, one’s sins are transferred into the chicken and after this purification the bird is slaughtered.

As we wandered into Mea Shearim we had only the vaguest idea of what we were actually looking for. The people we spoke to gave a positive indication that the ritual would occur later in the evening but were vague about exactly where and when.

During our initial perambulations, we saw a chicken enclosure on Yeheskel Street. I say “saw”, but our dominant impressions were rather more of the olfactory kind. The coop was large, but it only contained a couple of depressed looking hens. It had however retained the flies which had presumably been attracted to its quondam inhabitants.

Supposing that the foul had already been dispersed to the 100 gates, we continued our reconnaissance. Contrary to the expectations of many, we generally feel welcome in Mea Shearim. I have a perennially lost looking demeanour, and people chat to us and offer us assistance in Hebrew and in English.

We wandered in and out of compounds, through conservative areas with verbose interdictions above their gates detailing acceptable dress and behaviour. We passed posters requesting “yiddishe women stop de filing yerushlayim with the immodest wigs”, and hunted down Palestinian flags in the anti-Zionist neighbourhoods. We passed some Haredi women wearing full body coverings. The popup shops selling the four species for Sukkot were starting to open, but no kapparot.

When we circled back up Yeheskel Street, we found that a crowd was gathering at the coop which we had previously reconnoitred. Apparently, the evening’s chickens were yet to be delivered.

The first pallets of chickens were mobbed before the proprietors could even reach the designated enclosure. Some customers took there foul away with them, but most people seemed to stay and perform the ritual there and then.

The growing crowd was broadly constituted of two kinds of people, Haredi Jerusalemites and American’s visiting Israel for the High Holidays. The latter group seemed less familiar with the ritual procedures, and phones needed to be consulted, but they were evidently enjoying themselves and took lots of selfies.

The Haredim seemed to take the thing as more of an obligatory duty to be conducted. Some were in rather a rush. One chap prayed and swirled his hen as he walked from the coop to the slaughter area. A lot of men were still wearing fine bekishes and shtreimels, and I was rather concerned that a chicken – discombobulated by the situation – might excrete in confusion and soil the finery.

For families, the patriarch would perform the ritual on himself, his wife and his sons and daughters. Some children delighted in the game, but many were terrified of the little dinosaurs which were being orbited about their heads.

Lots of children were enthralled by the slaughter area, oblivious to their parents’ pleas to come away. Some people take their chickens home to kill and consume themselves, but most give them away to the poor and a lot of satisfaction was being taken in this mitzvah.

For what it is worth, I didn’t see anything particularly cruel in the proceedings. I was expecting the chickens to be swung around by the legs like a sling, but actually they were circled rather gently.  When the time came, they were slaughtered by a quick slit of the throat. I imagine far worse things happen in the abattoirs of most well know chicken shop franchises.

The turnover in the crowd was rather rapid. New people came and went, and more chickens were delivered and dispatched in their hecatombs. As the evening progressed however the smell – which had developed a sanguine taint – started to overpower me and we made our exit.

This was not my most pleasing sensory experience of the High Holidays, but it was a fascinating counterpoint to the songs of selichot.