Rabbi Avraham Juravel’s career as the OU’s reigning expert on food production has taken him to 50 American states and 40 foreign countries

Photos: Itzik Roytman

The sign hanging in Rabbi Avraham Juravel’s office in the kashrus division at the Orthodox Union’s lower Manhattan headquarters says it all about his approach to the field of kashrus — and life — in five words: “Think out of the box.” It’s an attitude that has made him, in the words of Rabbi Sholem Fishbane, executive director of the AKO kashrus umbrella group, “the most unique person working in kashrus today.”

His career as the OU’s reigning expert on food production has taken him to 50 American states and 40 foreign countries, enabling him to identify thousands of ingredients (sans a chemistry degree) and tour a plant while pointing out where every pipe leads and what every piece of machinery does. He’s a sought-after lecturer on kashrus topics, too, whose shiurim were recently published as a popular sefer.

Blessed with razor-sharp sleuthing skills and a preternatural sixth sense for what the eye can’t see — and, he emphasizes, a heavy dose of siyata d’Shmaya — Reb Avri, as he’s known to kashrus mavens worldwide, is able to catch things that elude most other people. That, in turn, has enabled him to spare kosher consumers from serious problems they didn’t even know existed, and sometimes, to solve a manufacturing mystery, too.

Once, he inspected a huge chocolate factory which had two completely separate production lines for milchig and pareve, with two separate sets of equipment. The non-Jewish owner approached him with a problem he was grappling with: He kept finding between a hundred to two hundred parts-per-million (PPMs) of dairy in his pareve chocolate, which meant lactose-intolerant consumers could no longer buy his products. He’d hired expensive consultants to find the source of the contamination, but to no avail, and turned to Rabbi Juravel in desperation.

“So I’m walking through the place,” Rabbi Juravel recalls, “and looking at the various machines… There were three storage tanks, three sweco [filtering] machines, every pipe connected to the right machine — I checked it all. But one worker operates all three, and as the chocolate is going around and around in the sweco filter, some of it will hit the side and become solid. So he has a spatula to scrape the chocolate off the sides. And then I saw it — the spatula is in his back pocket, and he’s using the same spatula for all three machines, dairy and pareve alike. I said to the owner, ‘Marty, right there are your PPMs — and by the way, it’s a kosher violation too.’ He didn’t even give me a chocolate chip for solving his problem, but I think I made a kiddush Hashem. So you have to see the metzius and you have to have siyata d’Shmaya to be there at the precise moment when the worker walks by.”

In another instance, Rabbi Juravel traveled to a Chinese vegetable cannery to examine their records before giving a hechsher to their canned bamboo shoots.

“They assigned a Chinese college student to be my translator,” he recalls. “The kid was like a walking, talking dictionary but didn’t understand a thing. As it turned out, that was the best thing that could have happened.

“I asked to see the records, but they were in Chinese, so I gave it to the translator to read. He told me it said the company had three workshops, one for fruit, a second one for vegetables, and a third one for treife seafood. When I asked to see Workshop # 3, I was told, ‘We don’t have the key, it’s locked.’ I said I just wanted to see it from the outside. When I looked through the window, I saw it had the same equipment as Workshop #2 where the bamboo shoots were supposed to be made.

“So I now knew the shoots could be made in either workshop, which meant that I needed real records of where they were, in fact, made. I told the translator, ‘Keep going,’ and he read on: ‘The workers from Workshop #2 were on vacation so we had to make it in Workshop #1 but we put on the code from #2 because it’s a vegetable and supposed to be made in #2.’ I asked for a copy of the records and took the next plane out to Hong Kong, where I was staying over Shabbos.

“I called New York and said, ‘No hechsher this year.’ They asked me why, and I said, ‘These people are playing games, their codes mean nothing.’ I faxed the records to someone at the importer’s office who said, ‘I’m dealing with them for 20 years — how did you catch this?’

“ ‘Because Hashem smiled at me and helped me to do my job so people could keep kosher,’ I answered.”