Animals, My Brethren-From a Concentration Camp Survivor

Edgar Kupfer was imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp in 1940. His last 3 years in Dachau he obtained a clerical job in the concentration camp storeroom. This position allowed him to keep a secret diary on stolen scraps of papers and pieces of pencil. He would bury his writings and when Dachau was liberated on April 29, 1945 he collected them again. The "Dachau Diaries" were published in 1956. From his Dachau notes he wrote an essay on vegetarianism which was translated into "immigrant" English. A carbon copy of this 38 page essay is preserved with the original Dachau Diaries in the Special Collection of the Library of the University of Chicago. The following are the excerpts from this essay that were reprinted in the postscript of the book "Radical Vegetarianism" by Mark Mathew Braunstein (1981 Panjandrum Books, Los Angeles, CA). The book is subtitled "A Dialectic of Diet and Ethic" and is recommended to all vegetarians especially those interested in natural hygiene.

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My Journey To Vegetarianism

By Jordanna G.

My journey toward vegetarianism and veganism was long and complicated but I knew my goal was to stop eating animals since I was three years old and I watched my father kill a fish.

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How Torah Study Helped Me Turn Vegetarian

By Eliana H.

I became drawn to Judaism when I worshiped with members of a temple in Seattle.  I started studying Judaism online and feel deep respect for the teachings of Judaism, and am grateful for this new website!

The parsha Va-Yikra covered the gory details of how to make offerings. As each of us in the Saturday morning Torah study group read from the Torah, I cringed inside as I thought of the slaughter of animals to cater to human taste. I remembered the time I was at a petting zoo and saw this cute black calf, and as I stroked its face, the huge vein in its neck was pulsing, beating life…life…life in a steady rhythm. I felt such a connection, a “oneness”, and wondered how in the world I could slit the throat of such a gentle creature to satisfy my palette.

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Change Isn’t Easy

By RocDoc

Once you start thinking about the ethical dimensions of what you eat, everything changes.  You can no longer eat the cooked flesh of formerly sentient fellow animals. You feel uncomfortable eating dairy products unless you know how the “producers” were treated--or you may decide to forgo dairy products completely.  You can’t go back to who you were before.

But it’s not so easy being pure. Sometimes, there are temptations or “situations”.  You’re not really a vegetarian if you cheat occasionally but is it still OK to hang out on vegetarian web sites, like ShalomVeg?  If you’re really trying but you just can’t get there yet, how guilty should you feel?

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I grew up in a nonobservant household, but I had a strong Jewish identity founded on an appreciation for the dignified history of our people and for Judaism's value driven contributions to humanity.

Long before my acquisition of a serious Jewish education, I took great comfort and pride in the knowledge that Judaism pioneered the idea of respectful responsibility of interaction between humans and the animal world. At an early age I was taught that the laws of Jewish slaughter reflect the concern for minimizing an animal's pain at the end of life. In my adult studies toward rabbinic ordination, the Jewish texts and sources affirmed the teachings of my childhood. Painfully, in the summer of 2003, the realities of our food industry hit me like a closed fist.