The Chief Rabbinate of Israel Kashrus Fraud Unit headed by Rabbi Rafi Yochai released an alert pertaining to electric flour sifters.
Of late inspectors have learned that some of the electric sifters being sold in Israel may not comply with halachic standards and making things worse, they claim to be approved by recognized by a recognized kashrus while the latter insist they do not give supervision to the product.
Attacked at two examples.
A letter from Rabbi Yosef Efrati Shlita states the electric sifter sold with his stamp of approval under the Gold Line label is not approved by him and uses a sifter with holes that are halachically too large to sift the flour.
The second product, under the Selmor name, was tested and found to be unacceptable, not meeting minimum halachic standards. The box shows approval from the Zomet Institute.
Testing showed that as designed, some of the flour is passed through the unit without being sifted at all.
When contacted, Zomet explained all items approved by the institute without exception appear on their website. YWN-ISRAEL did not find the Selmor sifter among those products on either the Hebrew or English websites.
(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
4 Responses
I’m confused. Can someone please explain what the halachic implications of a sifter are? What would there be halochos for a sifter?
Dc dib sifter is to sift out bugs
Why would we worry about “bugs” in flower and not in other foods which have the same “powdery” consistency such as corn starch,potato starch or baking powder? Another example of stretching halacha to create a problem.
There is a mistake in this article. The Selmor sifter was given an ishur and later found to have an issue. Tzomet updated the ishur with specific instructions on how to use it permissibly. Here is a copy of the ishur in Hebrew:
http://www.zomet.org.il/_Uploads/dbsAttachedFiles/NAPA_SELMOR.pdf
Don’t throw out your Selmor sifter, just use it correctly. These are expensive products and this article could cause people to throw them out. Also this could cause a loss of business for the company. Please update the article!