by Craig Winchell » Mon Jul 23, 2012 10:55 am
Yes, of course vice-versa. But it's gotta start somewhere.
Eli indeed has a point, if half the population actively keeps nominally kosher to a full extent. That may be so for the less educated/less sophisticated, but in my experience, the last types of products to become kosher in houses of increasing kashrus are cheese and wine. This was my own family's experience, as well as that of many people I know. Growing up, we had 4 sets of dishes (2 for Pesach), only bought kosher meat, and tried to always read ingredient labels. But we ate nonkosher cheese, drank nonkosher wine, and even local orthodox rabbis didn't make a big deal about that, though they didn't typically eat our cheese or drink our wine. These are things which typically are not kosher almost entirely due to takanah (of course, we didn't understand that at the time to justify it to ourselves, because we were not observant enough to require justification).
In Israel, where most of the winery principals and people doing the work in the wineries (not the vineyards, necessarily) are Jewish, it should be easier and less costly to make a winery kosher, without resorting to full-time staff of observant go-betweens. Are Jews who are not Shabbos observant to be treated as idol-worshippers (as those who actively thwart Shabbos observance must be, as they are definitely desecrating Shabbos), or as people who don't understand the importance of Shabbos observance? To a large extent, in chutz la'Aretz, such Jews are treated as the latter (although typically not in terms of wine kashrus, as a matter of policy, for a number of reasons). In Israel, there is widespread treatment as the former, due to the concept that things should be stricter on The Land due to kedushas haAretz. Perhaps there should be more effort to find kulahs to include, rather than exclude, less observant Jews. Perhaps the cost of wine kashrus, at least a nominal kashrus status, could legitimately decrease, affording greater access.
