An Orthodox Jew practices kaparot in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Photo: Marlow Stern

By Marlow Stern

A tall, bearded, bespectacled man wraps his gloved hand firmly around the neck of a hen. Bird in tow, he approaches his cherubic 7-year-old daughter and raises the chicken high above his daughter’s head. The young child flinches and shrieks in the face of the frantic, wing-flapping fowl. The man circles the elevated hen around his daughter’s head three times while reciting an ancient chant in Yiddish—a chant echoed by his offspring. The hen is then handed over to a burly butcher in a green jumpsuit wielding a shimmering razor, his shaggy beard and scalp obscured by plastic hairnets. In a swift horizontal motion, the hen’s throat is slashed, and blood slowly drips down its twitching shanks.

This is the ritual of kaparot – sometimes spelled kapparos or kaporos – whereby Orthodox Jews take live chickens, swing them over their heads as a means of transferring their sins onto the chickens, and then have them slaughtered on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. This year, Yom Kippur falls on September 28. The idea behind this practice is that the animal dies in the person’s stead, and when its throat is slit, the soul slowly departs into the night sky. The ritual is a family affair, and evidence that the tight-knit Orthodox Jewish community continues to cling to their beliefs, however contrary to the zeitgeist.

“The point of kaparot is an exchange,” said Rabbi Chayim B. Alevsky of the West Side Chabad, while cradling a child in his office. “If something sinful was meant to happen to us in the coming year, God should save us, and it should be atoned for through the death of this chicken. We will then be elevated spiritually, because the chicken is later donated to feed the poor.”

Today, kaparot is performed in only Haredi – or Ultra-Orthodox – Jewish communities. In New York City, the largest kaparot ceremony occurs along Kingston Avenue in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

The kaparot slaughtering stand pre-ritual in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Photo: Marlow Stern

At 9:30 p.m. Saturday – the eve of Yom Kippur – a large truck housing about 2,000 chickens, packed four to a crate, arrived at the site on Kingston Ave. Bright spotlights shone down on the gated-off city street, as a gaggle of puzzled policemen looked on. A long line of Jews in Hasidic garb has formed. The men have beards, yarmulkes and dark jackets/trousers, while the women don headscarves (tichels), long, conservative skirts, and sleeves past the elbow. They have lined up to purchase chicken tickets for $10 apiece. These tickets are then taken to the trucks, where the crateboys hand you your rooster (for a man) or hen (for a woman).

It’s a family affair said Pini Althaus, a 35-year-old father of two. Pini claims that kaparot is a very enlightening ritual for his young daughters, Loni, 7, and Basi, 10. “They know they could’ve done certain things throughout the year that could’ve warranted better behavior,” said Pini. “They understand that they’ve got to behave throughout the rest of the year.”

But is Pini’s youngest daughter excited about the chicken-swinging ceremony? “No,” said Loni, a cute girl with curly brown hair and a cherubic face. She then turned to her mother Chaya Althaus, absorbed her disapproving glare, and exclaimed, “Yeah, yeah I am. Because it’s fun!”

Orthodox Jewish children are taught about the history of kaparot in Hebrew School from a very young age. “They came home with fake chickens they made in arts and crafts,” said Pessi Schochet, a 35-year-old mother of two from Crown Heights. “Our youngest boy is only two, and he came home with one and he knew about it.” She then points to her drooling toddler fast asleep in a stroller. “It’s upsetting that he passed out!”

Bystanders wait to redeem their tickets for chickens at the kaparot ceremony in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Photo: Marlow Stern

Despite the family-friendly nature of the Crown Heights ritual, the tradition of kaparot has come under heavy fire from animal rights groups. In 2005, a number of caged chickens were abandoned in rainy weather following a kaparot ceremony in Brooklyn. Jacob Kalish, an Orthodox Jewish man from Williamsburg, was charged with animal cruelty for the drowning deaths of 35 of these kaparot chickens.

“We oppose how the birds are treated before, during, and after the ceremony, including holding the birds in crates, without sustenance or shelter or any show of care or compassion, for days leading up to the ritual,” said Karen Davis, President of United Poultry Concerns, whose aim is to promote the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl. “We object to the callous way practitioners hold the chickens with their wings pulled back, which puts the chicken at risk of ligament and tendon injury, and possible bone fracture.”

It’s not just animal rights activists who oppose the practice of kaparot. The ritual has even been denounced by fellow, non-Haredi Jewry, who prefer the use of money instead of chickens on the grounds of tza’ar ba’alei chayim (unnecessary pain to animals). “Normative Jewry, we don’t do that now,” said Cantor Sherwood Goffin of Lincoln Square Synagogue in his spacious office. “We just take charity. And because I am giving to charity, may that charity be to my merit.”

The Torah teaches Jews that all of God’s lesser creatures are here to serve humanity. And the kosher slaughter of the chicken is painless, according to onlooker Benad Evenchen, a 22-year-old visitor from Israel. “The neck has a place where you cut it, and when the knife is very, very sharp, it doesn’t hurt and doesn’t harm the soul of the chicken,” said Evenchen. “We have to understand that what we see here is the Will of God.”

A kosher butcher slaughters a chicken with a razor during the kaparot ceremony in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Photo: Marlow Stern

With hundreds of Jews packed into a site a quarter of the size of a city block, it’s a particularly odd ceremony for Orthodox Jewish women. “Usually men and women are separated, but tonight, I feel like I’ve been bumped by so many men,” said Yocheved Amrami, a 28-year-old Jewish woman hugging a rail far from the action. Amrami feels the actual act of swinging can be overwhelming for young children. “It’s little kids who don’t know how to treat animals well, and it’s nerve-wracking,” said Amrami. She also objects on fecal grounds, adding, “And they could poop on you, cause they’re so nervous, they freak out!”

For a ceremony that has such solemn connotations, the act of swinging a chicken seems more than a little bizarre. “Kaparot is absolutely the funniest custom we have, hands down,” said Rabbi Alevsky. “There’s plenty of giggling and laughing going around, and there’s a lot of shrieking, ‘I don’t want to touch it!’ ‘Get it away from me!’” He pauses, before adding, “And the chicken often poops on people. It chooses its targets very carefully.”

An Orthodox Jew swings a chicken around the heads of his sons at the kaparot ceremony in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Photo: Marlow Stern

Joel and Ethan Coen, the minds behind "A Serious Man." Photo: Focus Features

By Marlow Stern

Larry Gopnik stands tall atop his roof. Wearing slacks hiked up around the waist, a tucked in beige plaid shirt and thick glasses, he surveys his Minnesota suburb like a nebbish gargoyle – the endless lines of lopsided lawns and fences encircling cookie-cutter houses. To his right, he observes his belligerent, xenophobic neighbors unloading a dead deer from their station wagon, and to his left lays a voluptuous housewife sunbathing in the nude.

Gopnik is the middling protagonist of the Coen brothers’ 14th feature film, “A Serious Man.” The film, opening on Oct. 2 just days after Yom Kippur, travels back to the brothers’ hometown milieu of 1967 suburban Minnesota. It’s a Job-like parable that was inspired by Joel and Ethan Coen’s memories of their childhood in St. Louis Park, a heavily Jewish enclave that borders southern Minneapolis.

“The community itself was one that was bred fairly cohesively,” said Joel. “You felt like the Jewish community was part of what was bounding your experience.”

At the heart of the story is the aforementioned Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a Jewish academic undergoing a spiritual and existential crisis. His Orthodox Jewish wife, Judith, is leaving him for a colleague; his brother, Arthur, lives on his couch; his son, Danny, steals money to smoke marijuana in the bathroom stalls of Hebrew school; and his daughter, Sarah, desperately wants a nose job. Out of desperation, Gopnik, a largely unobservant Jew, seeks spiritual guidance from three rabbis to become a person of substance – a serious man.

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) stands tall atop his roof in "A Serious Man." Photo: Focus Features

Following the critical and commercial disappointment of 2004’s “The Ladykillers,” the Coen brothers took some time off to think. Out of this brainstorming session came the concepts for future films: “No Country For Old Men,” “Burn After Reading” and “A Serious Man.”

“We were thinking about short films years ago, and there was a particular rabbi in our town who used to meet the bar mitzvah kids after the bar mitzvah,” says Joel Cohen. “He was a sort of Sphinx-like, Wizard of Oz-type character, and we thought, ‘Well that might make an interesting short movie.’ And somehow, that idea found it’s way into this story.”

Like the Danny, Joel, 54, and Ethan, 52, attended Hebrew School from second to seventh grade, five days a week. But they were anything but serious men. “When you’re a kid, all that religious instruction and language instruction is just a chore,” said Ethan. “You don’t want to go to Hebrew School. You don’t want to go to shul on the weekends. It’s all more schooling.”

The film’s most uproarious scene concerns Danny’s bar mitzvah – experienced through Danny’s stoned eyes. While the Coens maintain they weren’t high during their own bar mitzvahs, it was nonetheless a memorable occasion.

“We read one or two Torah portions,” said Ethan. “As in the movie, we each got a kiddush cup for a bar mitzvah gift. Joel still has his. I don’t know where mine is.”

Joel chimes in, “The rabbi’s rap at the end was actually verbatim from our bar mitzvah. It was the same thing. Every Saturday, Rabbi Arnie Goodman would end with, ‘Till that wonderful day when you stand under your chuppah!’”

Danny Gopnik is stoned during his bar mitzvah in "A Serious Man." Photo: Focus Features

Nowadays, the brothers have distanced themselves from their Orthodox Jewish upbringing. “I don’t know if, as a religion per se, it’s that much of a live issue for either of us,” said Ethan.

And it hasn’t been for quite some time. In his senior thesis at Princeton University, Ethan called belief in the Almighty “the height of stupidity,” according to Cathleen Falsani’s tome “The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers.” And Joel is married to the actress Frances McDormand, the daughter of a Disciples of Christ Minister, and even jokes, “We’ve raised our son, Pedro, as a Pagan.”

Still, depictions of Jews have long permeated the Coen brothers’ oeuvre, and these subjects are often prone to caricature – from the title character, a neurotic Jewish writer, in 1991’s “Barton Fink,” to the loud-mouthed, Shabbos-obsessed converted Jew Walter Sobchak in 1998’s “The Big Lebowski.” This has led some to accuse the Coens of perpetuating longstanding ethnic stereotypes. “Occasionally people would ask, ‘You’re not making fun of the Jews, are you?’” said Ethan. “We are not, but some will take anything that isn’t flattering as an indication that we think the whole community or ethnicity is flawed.”

The only deities, it seems, in the world of “A Serious Man,” are the Coen brothers, who torment their feeble protagonist with a never-ending string of calamities – a theory alluded to by the film’s star, Michael Stuhlbarg: “It’s not quite certain if it’s God or the Coen’s hand that is responsible for what happens.”

In one nightmare scenario, Larry Gopnik stands in front of a gigantic blackboard, filled from top to bottom with an illustration of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. He stares blankly at his students in the grand lecture hall. Moments later, his head is repeatedly smashed into that very blackboard by his wife’s illicit lover. The Coen brothers’ films, like life itself, offer many puzzling questions with very little didacticism.

“We have this character who’s beset by all these problems and he goes to his rabbis for relief,” said Ethan. “No doubt there are people who would tell a story about a guy who goes to his religious leaders for relief and gets enlightened. And that’s fine. But God, we would never make that movie!”

“Geez!” exclaimed Joel. “We were never interested in provoking them intellectually!”