c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Need your kitchen koshered in a hurry? Having a kosher emergency? Call 1-888-GO-KOSHER!

Rabbi Sholtiel Lebovic, 40, runs the non-profit organization Go Kosher out of Brooklyn, N.Y. He provides same-day service for Jews who want to set up a kosher kitchen, and comes armed with a blowtorch to sterilize the oven and a critical gaze for suspicious kitchen supplies.

An Orthodox Jew, Lebovic started his company more than 15 years ago as a rabbinical student. In recent years, keeping kosher is on the rise as more Jews _ both nondenominational and from the Conservative and Reform branches _ have become interested. He estimates that 60 percent of his business comes from people going kosher for the first time.

He estimates he’s koshered more than 10,000 kitchens over the years and gets between 20 to 35 calls a month. Go Kosher services New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, but will go further afield for special occasions like a wedding. He also walks people through it over the phone _ college students in a dorm or snow birds in a Florida condo.

Lebovic is also the subject of a documentary, 888-GO-KOSHER by Lauren Shweder Biel, which is playing at the Atlanta and Miami Jewish Film Festivals this month. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What inspired you to start your business?

A: I started doing it as a young yeshiva student when I was about 18 with my father in New Jersey. On Fridays, and here and there when I had time off, I would go and help people kosher their kitchens, and I saw the need for an outfit to do this, to inform people and to help them through the process. It’s more about working with people than about working with pots and pans.

Q: Your niche seems to be doing it in a hurry _ same-day service for people.

A: For people who are already kosher and they’ve moved to a new location, for them, speed is more of an attraction. People who are going kosher (for the first time), it doesn’t have to be done yesterday. People who are going kosher from scratch often would cut out an ad of mine in the paper and hold onto it for a very long time.

Q: Are you the only service that does it this quickly?

A: I think we are the only organization nationwide solely devoted to this. There are other rabbis and people who will help someone go kosher, but sometimes it can be quite labor intensive, and we are the only ones solely devoted to it.

Q: How do you kosher a kitchen?

A: The koshering process is actually more technical than mystical … Usually I’ll have a preliminary phone conversation, explaining what can be koshered and what possibly cannot be koshered. I also give them some ideas as to which extra items they may have to purchase. If they’re going to have a meat and dairy kitchen, one of the basics of keeping kosher is to keep the milk and meat separate. That goes not only for eating, but cooking and service as well. This gives them a chance to get an extra set of pots possibly, an extra set of silverware, cutlery, serving utensils, prep knives, cutting boards.

And then, as far as salvaging the things they already have, basically I’ll boil up a large pot of water and I will immerse all the things that can be koshered in that mode in water with tongs, with heavy rubber gloves. In some situations, we’ll torch the oven, in some situations we’ll torch heavy frying pans.

Q: To a non-Jewish person, koshering a kitchen just seems like a really thorough cleaning. What makes it religiously or ritualistically significant?

A: There’s a lot of truth to that because something that is not cleaned properly _ an item where the previous residue has not been totally removed _ cannot be koshered.

So what makes it (religiously significant), certain items need to be koshered properly as prescribed by the Jewish code of law. Cleaning alone is not enough; things have to be immersed in boiling water, certain things have to be torched at times.

Q: How do you explain the growing interest in keeping kosher?

A: I think it reflects a growing desire on the part of Jewish people to be connected, or at least somewhat connected, to their tradition. They realize that being Jewish and having a Jewish identity is not only cultural but also there should be some religious connection as well.

Ultimately it’s a soul thing. It’s coming from a very deep place, it’s an outgrowth. I’ll speak in kind of mystical terms, of the Jewish soul yearning to be connected to God in the Jewish way.

KRE/CM END RNS775 words

A photo of Sholtiel Lebovic is available via https://religionnews.com.