Kosher in Abu Dhabi

It was hard to believe. Remember the date: August 31, 2020. Fox News reported: “A Star of David-adorned El Al plane flew from Israel to the United Arab Emirates on Monday, carrying a high-ranking American and Israeli delegation to Abu Dhabi in the first-ever direct commercial passenger flight between the two countries.”

The Israeli delegation was headed by National Security Council Chief Meir Ben-Shabbat (who always wears a kippa), while the American delegation was headed by senior White House advisor Jared Kushner, President Trump’s religiously-traditional Jewish son-in-law. They came with their advisors and government ministers to hammer out the details of a historic peace agreement between Israel and the UAE, the third Arab country to “normalize” relations with the Jewish State.

 The day before, another group traveled to the UAE. Quietly, without all the fanfare of the next day’s arrival, they quickly got to business – in the kitchen. This group was led by a tall, demure, easygoing 36-year-old man wearing a black kaftan and black hat who was born in Silver Spring, Maryland, and grew up in Sharon, Massachusetts. (His parents, Dr. and Mrs. Elie Krakowski, moved to Baltimore 18 years ago.)

His name is Rabbi Yissachar Dov Krakowski, and he is Rabbinic Coordinator for OU Kosher in Israel and a seasoned mashgiach. The OU certifies over 200 businesses in Israel (mostly for export) and a smattering of restaurants. (Next time you are in Jerusalem, try the Brazilian steakhouse Papagaio. It’s under OU supervision, has a mashgiach temidi, and the steaks are rather good!)

Rabbi Krakowski came to Israel 17 years ago to learn in Yeshivas Brisk. After marrying the daughter of Rabbi and Mrs. Moshe Rabinowitz of Shaarei Chesed, he decided to make Israel his home. He continued his learning in Kollel Nachlas Elazar, in Yerushalayim, where he received semicha, and served as Rav of Kehillas Torah Vechesed in the Nachlaot neighborhood from 2007 to 2011.

Rabbi Krakowski dreamed of becoming a magid shiur, not a kashrut administrator and certifier – and indeed, he is a Rebbe in Yeshivas Heichal HaTorah in Har Nof – but, as life would have it, kashrut supervision would take the young rabbi through some interesting experiences and places.

It was not within the purview of the OU to give its kosher stamp of approval on the peace deal with the UAE, but at least participants Meir Ben-Shabbat, Jared Kushner, American ambassador to Israel David Melech Friedman, and other kashrut-conscientious Jews could rest assured that they weren’t going to go hungry in the scorchingly hot desert state.

This was not Rabbi Krakowski’s first time working in an Arab country. In fact, this was his third time in Abu Dhabi! He has also supervised in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the Palestinian Territories. Although he bentches gomel after every overseas trip – and this last one to the UAE was no exception – at no time did he feel threatened. “I did not feel that I was ever in the grip of danger. I felt very safe on this trip.”

That’s not to say it was easy to get there. Had he traveled the following day with the American-Israeli delegation, it would have been a mechayeh – a direct, 3.5-hour flight from Israel to UAE over Saudi airspace. On previous trips to UAE, he traveled via Amman, Jordan. This time, Amman airport was closed because of COVID, and the next-best alternative, Istanbul, wasn’t an option. UAE would not accept flights from there because of the high number of infections in Turkey. So, he had to first fly north to Sofia, Bulgaria to fly south to the Emirates.

Rabbi Krakowski shared his impressions of the country with me. “It’s a little bit, lehavdil, like Israel. Seventy years ago, it was a midbar shemama (place of desolation), and now it’s an upscale, built-up country with start-up businesses and agriculture in the middle of the desert. They have institutions of health and science and universities. For such a young country, it’s very impressive what they’ve managed to do for. [Note: The UAE was founded in December 1971!]

Except for one sightseeing trip to Dubai, where he wore a white shirt, black pants, and a baseball cap, on this and previous trips to Abu Dhabi, he wore his regular rabbinic attire with no problems – whether to and from the airport, the hotel, or various companies where he did his kashrut inspection. Occasionally, people would approach him in a good-natured fashion to take a selfie.

While in the dining room as the delegations were being served, Krakowski had a chance to shmooze with some of them. But the real high-level delegates, like Kushner and Friedman, were nowhere to be seen. “Jared Kushner always goes on his own [to private] meetings. He does things very quietly. That’s his modus operandi pretty much everywhere. He always goes to meetings without any fanfare. He would get his meals sealed up and sent to his private venue. He was never in the dining room with the rest of the delegation.”

The kitchen team had to prepare kosher meals for about 100 out of the total of 150 people. Rabbi Krakowski estimates that between 50 and 70 people chose the kosher option. Both the kosher and non-kosher diners were in the same dining room. Place cards with the letter “K” were put on the tables. People were asked whether they wanted kosher or not. If they said no, the place card was removed from their place setting. It helped the waiters to know who was eating what, and also served as a heker (demarcation) between the diners, which is required according to halacha when two people are eating at the same table – where meat and dairy or kosher and non-kosher are served – so that one does not eat the food of the other.

“All the plates and all the cutlery were brand new at every meal,” said Rabbi Krakowski. “After the meal, all the plates were sent away to one of the treife kitchens in the hotel – even plates used by the kosher guests. They weren’t even rinsed – but sent immediately to another part of the hotel. To get out of doubt’s way, they were all viewed as treife. That’s how we managed.”

Even the first time that Rabbi Krakowski came to Dubai, he wasn’t overwhelmed by the experience, because he had been in touch with the Jewish community there for some time. “They assured me that Dubai was very safe and that I could walk around in my rabbinic garb. Most of the Jewish community members came to live in Dubai for work or business, but some (especially European Jews) came to attend university there. “

Rabbi Krakowski differentiated between his travels to Jordan and the Palestinian territories and to Abu Dhabi and Dubai. In the former, he was picked up and taken to wherever he had to go for work purposes. There was no sightseeing. But when it came to the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, he was an official guest of the Royal Court. “I got the red-carpet treatment.”

But what was it like to be a Jew deep inside an Arab country and its culture, surrounded by mosques and throngs of Arabs in traditional dress? Did that change the way he viewed Arabs? Was he in awe? After all, in Israel, Arabs are a minority! (I was thinking about my own experience visiting Egypt in 1983, when I traveled to Cairo, a city of 10 million people.)

In answering, Rabbi Krakowski filled me in on his background: “I was born and grew up initially in the Washington D.C. area – Silver Spring, to be exact – because my father was working in the Reagan administration as Special Assistant to the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense (See “An Interview with Dr. Elie Krakowski” by Elaine Berkowitz in www.wherewhatwhen.com/authors.) In that capacity he had been around many of the Arab countries at various points in time. Even after he left the Pentagon and went into academics, he missed ‘the action’ and went into consulting for some government agencies. So he had been to many Arab countries, and he sometimes brought Arab princes from different places to our house. So I always knew there were Arabs and there were Arabs – just as they had to explain to President Trump that there were different kinds of Jews. He couldn’t understand how he was so good to Israel but there were liberal Jews who were attacking him. So people explained to him that ‘there are Jews and there are Jews.’ In a certain way, not all Arabs were created equal, so to speak.”

I was not satisfied with the answer, so I prodded, “Besides your greater appreciation of the differences among the Arabs, do you have a greater appreciation of the Arabs themselves, their culture, their ethics, their way of life, or do you continue to see them as you saw them before?” The young Rabbi’s answer surprised me:

“That’s a good question. The answer is complex. I think that you start to appreciate humanity in general in a different way and are able to see the good side in people. That doesn’t mean that the UAE is a perfect society without any corruption, but there is a certain ethical code, and there is a respect for certain social dictums that, in the public arena, are very well kept to. And they have important codes of ethics. It’s not necessarily western, or even right, but there’s something decent about it. There’s very little crime, very little theft or murder. So you begin to understand Chazal when they praise the Babylonians and the Persians in certain aspects. You begin to appreciate that there are peoples who should be admired for certain behaviors, ethics, and dictums. And since we Jews believe that we are a light unto the nations, we should absorb the good things we find in other nations. So, there is a tremendous lesson to learn from that statement in the Talmud.”

I asked him if he saw the UAE agreement as the start of a trend.

“While there are others countries that are not far behind the Emirates (re: their normalization with Israel), Saudi Arabia is different, because they have the most holy places to Moslems, and a very extreme element living within as well as visiting their country. So they must be much more sensitive towards these elements when it comes to issues with Jews, with the “Zionist element” as they call it – Israel, etc. So it’s a little more complex with a country like Saudi Arabia. In the Emirates, which is a vastly modern country – especially the two Emirates of Abu Dhabi and Dubai –  it’s much easier because they don’t have anybody to worry about. They can do what they want. There’s a difference in the timeline between the moderate countries and the countries with the extreme elements. So, lehavdil, even though Israel is, by and large, a secular country, because it is home to places that are holy to Jews, they must be sensitive to the feelings of their religious elements. Nevertheless, the Saudi government has made it clear that they are supportive of the UAE initiative.”

Although Rabbi Krakowski stayed mostly behind the scenes in the kitchen, he did manage, here and there, to shmooze with some notables. After all, he comes from a home that is interested in geopolitics and in his spare time naturally gravitated to ask these officials as well as others the same kind of questions that I was asking him. Some of those people were John Rakolta Jr., the U.S. ambassador to the UAE; Aryeh Lightstone, senior adviser to Ambassador David Friedman (who also happens to be a good friend of his); and Khalifa Saeed Al-Mahmoud Al Maktoum, from MOPA (UAE’s Ministry of Presidential Affairs), the official representative of the UAE to Israel. This fellow speaks a pretty decent Hebrew! When Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke to him, he asked him how he knew Hebrew. Khalifa answered, in Hebrew, “From Zoom.” (You can hear him speaking Hebrew at www.theyeshivaworld.com by typing in the search bar “Khalifa Saeed Al-Mahmoud.” Forget ulpan, my friends!) Khalifa, the first cousin of the current ruler of Dubai, was educated in a school in Cambridge and owns some very expensive thoroughbred racehorses.

I asked Rabbi Krakowski if an Orthodox Jewish businessman who wanted to touch base in the Emirates could manage.  His answer: “Very easily so!” He told me that there are two “fully up and operating” shuls there. One is a combination of Chabad and Edot Ha-Mizrach. The second shul is the official community synagogue. They both offer Shabbos meals.

As for the rest of the week, there is a kosher catering service in Dubai, Elli’s Kosher Kitchen, run by Mrs. Elli Kriel from her own home kitchen, (see www.elliskosherkitchen.com). Mrs. Kriel, who is certified by the UAE’s Chief Rabbi, plans to enlarge her business with a full commercial-size kitchen. (See: blogs.timesofisrael.com/how-i-became-chief-rabbi-of-the-uae-and-why-that-matters-to-global-jewry).

Rabbi Krakowski sends his acquaintances on WhatsApp a weekly dvar Torah on the parsha. He was kind enough to share with me a dvar Torah he presented to the Jewish community in the Emirates:

The Talmud says that, whoever performs a mitzva in Chutz La’aretz, G-d puts beneath him a “thread of the Land of Israel.” The Chofetz Chaim explains, by way of a parable, that it’s like an embassy. The embassy sits on the property that belongs to and is within the jurisdiction of the country it represents. A person in the French embassy in the U.S. is for all legal purposes on French soil.

One of the things that was a catalyst for this whole peace initiative was that the UAE government allowed a Jewish community, albeit small, to form there. And it’s been flourishing ever since. So, the members of the Jewish community and its Jewish visitors have, so to speak, sanctified the ground. We create “embassies” for Israel by the mitzvot we perform abroad.

Sam Finkel is a former Baltimorean and frequent contributor to the Where What When. He is the author of  Rebels in the Holy Land, Mazkeret Batya – an Early Battleground for the Soul of Israel, which was recently recommended for reading by Segula Magazine, the only popular Jewish history magazine in print.