Kosher Meat Deliveries Help Families Keep the Faith : Religion: A Westside market brings the food to a Rancho Palos Verdes synagogue. The service helps about a dozen area families maintain a practice that identifies them as Jews.

For years, Estelle Markowitz of Rancho Palos Verdes felt, well, guilty about not keeping a kosher home.

She had grown up in a Conservative Jewish family in which only certain kinds of meat could be eaten--and only when prepared according to strict religious guidelines.

But when she started her own family, Markowitz abandoned those traditional dietary laws. It was easy to make excuses, she said, when the nearest kosher butcher was 20 miles away.

Then two years ago, a Westside kosher meat market started a monthly delivery service that took the schlep out of keeping kosher. The meat deliveries helped Markowitz, 63, return to her roots. Today, she is proud to say her home is free of trayf --Yiddish for non-kosher foods.

“I really value this service,” Markowitz said. “I feel identified as a Jew when I do this.”

That feeling of identification can be elusive in the South Bay, which has one of the smallest concentrations of Jews in Los Angeles County. Over the years, the South Bay’s small but slowly growing Jewish population has had to make do without many of the amenities enjoyed by their counterparts in the Westside and the San Fernando Valley.

The meat deliveries offer more than convenience. For the dozen or so families who use the service, the deliveries make it possible for them to maintain a basic religious practice that identifies them as Jews.

Kosher dietary laws are “absolutely fundamental to traditional Judaism,” said Rabbi Ronald Shulman of Congregation Ner Tamid in Rancho Palos Verdes. “It’s a basic Jewish practice that any observant Jewish family would absolutely participate in.”

The delivery system is simple. On the first Monday of every month, Doheny Kosher Meat Market in West Los Angeles takes telephone orders for each family’s monthly supply of meat. The meat is packaged and placed in boxes marked with the families’ names and tape bearing the kosher seal.

On Wednesday, Uri Sterin, 46, a meat market employee, delivers the boxes to Congregation Ner Tamid, where they are placed in the synagogue’s refrigerator. The families come by later that day to pick up their meat.

The market, one of about 25 in the Pico-Fairfax area, does not charge for delivery, owner Michael Engelman said. Nor does the synagogue receive anything for its cooperation.

The synagogue has a more important reason for serving as a drop-off point for the meat.

“It makes it easier for people who keep kosher anyway, but I’ve noticed people take advantage of this service who might not otherwise have made the extra effort to get kosher meat,” Shulman said.

Only 20% of all Jews in the United States follow strict kosher dietary laws, according to a 1990 study by the National Council of Jewish Federations.

No one knows what percentage of the South Bay’s 45,000 Jews eat only kosher meat, but Jewish officials say the proportion is probably smaller than that for the nation as a whole.

That’s because only 19% of the South Bay’s Jewish population is Conservative or Orthodox, the two movements that place a high value on observing the dietary laws. Nationwide, nearly 60% of all Jews identify with those two movements. Reform Jews, which make up half of the South Bay’s Jewish population and 35% of the nation’s population, do not generally adhere to kosher dietary laws.

“Because our people do not feel it is a literal commandment from God that makes any sense and because there are other, more meaningful marks of Jewish identity in this world, it doesn’t make sense for them to keep kosher,” said Rabbi Davis S. Lieb of Temple Beth-El in San Pedro, a Reform congregation.

To Shulman and many other observant Jews, however, kosher dietary laws are a fundamental cornerstone of the faith, as important as prayer and keeping the Sabbath.

Today, about 25% of the 500 families who belong to Congregation Ner Tamid keep kosher homes, Shulman said. But, he said, he receives inquiries at least a few times a year from families who want help making their kitchen kosher.

Often the request is sparked by a teen-ager in the family who is exploring his Jewish identity, he said. Other families become interested in kosher dietary laws after experimenting with vegetarianism, which traditional Jews consider the purest form of keeping kosher.

Under kosher dietary laws, only certain classes of meat, poultry and fish may be eaten. All birds, except carnivorous ones, are allowed under Jewish law. But only fish that have gills, scales and fins are allowed. Shellfish, shark and eel are not kosher.

Animals that chew their cud and have parted hoofs--including cows, goats, sheep, deer, buffalo and antelope--are considered kosher. Pork, rabbit, bear and horse meat are among those that are not.

It is not enough, however, to be among the permitted classes of meat to be deemed kosher. Kosher dietary laws require the animals to be slaughtered according to Jewish law.

The requirements are so stringent that only a trained and licensed shohet , a ritual slaughterer, is allowed to do it. Among the more important guidelines is that the animal must be killed with a single stroke of an extremely sharp knife, which is said to minimize the animal’s suffering, Shulman said.

Jewish law also requires the shohet to examine the animal after slaughter to determine that it is free of any defects. Animals found to have missing limbs, torn membranes or broken bones must be discarded, according to the guidelines.

The meat must also be drained of blood to be considered kosher. This can be done either by roasting it over an open flame or by soaking it in water for 30 minutes, sprinkling it with medium-texture salt and then letting it stand for one hour.

Observant Jews drain the blood from the meat to maintain a separation between what is considered the symbol of life (blood) and the symbol of death (animal flesh). The practice “instills a reverence for life, that it is not to be taken for granted in any way,” Shulman said.

Kosher dietary laws also forbid the mixing of meat and milk products. Salami and cheese sandwiches, for instance, are forbidden. The same holds true for beef stroganoff. Observant Jews customarily wait anywhere from 72 minutes to six hours between the consumption of milk and meat.

The law against mixing is so strict that traditional Jewish homes keep two sets of dishes and utensils, one for meat and the other for dairy products. The dishes cannot even be washed together.

The separation of milk and dairy is said to be a reaction to pagan rituals in which calf meat was boiled in its mother’s milk, a tradition that ancient Jews considered particularly cruel, Shulman said.

Although many people, Jews included, regard kosher dietary laws as antiquated and irrelevant, traditional Jews see them as “an ethical practice designed to reflect human sanctity and reverence for life,” Shulman said.

“We just have to look at the television to know we as a society have no respect for life,” Shulman said. “We kill wantonly. We carry guns in our pockets.

“If you ask me,” he said, “the laws are more relevant today than ever.”