The community may not be the largest in the province, but it does have a long history. Within this CMA, there are 1515 Jews making the area the seventh largest Jewish community in the province of Ontario (Shahar 2014: 84). For demographic purposes, the county is divided into a Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) consisting of the City of Windsor and the towns of LaSalle, Lakeshore, Tecumseh, and Amherstburg all within the County of Essex.
It is comprised of a population of 398,953 people as per the 2016 census (Statistics Canada 2017).
Windsor-Essex is the southernmost region in Ontario and by extension Canada as well. It is believed that participants who are younger and more educated will be less inclined to adhere to kashrut in comparison to those who are older and less educated. Along with the difficulty associated with keeping fully kosher, I argue that the participant demographics, particularly age and education, need to be taken into consideration, as they affect adherence levels. The former requires simple avoidance, whereas the latter requires one to have separate housewares, appliances, and kitchens. In reference to hypotheses, I have arranged these five questions in order of what I perceive to be an increasing level of difficulty of adherence, suspecting that it is easier to avoid eating pork and shellfish than it is to separate meat and dairy. The article will present the responses as percentages along with comments offered by the participants. To discover the degree to which the kosher laws are observed, participants were invited to answer five questions on the following topics: consumption of pork and other non-kosher land animals, consumption of non-kosher seafood, mixing meat and dairy, purchase of only hechshered products (i.e., those certified as kosher by a formal organization with this purpose), and dining at non-kosher restaurants. The methodology section outlines the interview process along with a tabular list of the participants’ demographics. The few sources on keeping kosher in Canada have also been included. The literature review surveys the major topics and debates within the subject of Jewish foodways. The article begins with an overview of the Jewish community of Windsor-Essex with emphasis on the institutions and kosher options in the area. The kosher laws will be the sole focus of this article given their unique expressions among this sample. An article on the first three indicators, namely belief in God, prayer life, and Sabbath observances, was published in Canadian Jewish Studies (Cappucci 2020).
The study used eight indicators to measure religiosity, namely belief in God, prayer, the Sabbath, congregational activities, holidays, kashrut, the mitzvot, and the World to Come. This study was entitled, Progressives and purists: A study of religiosity in a Canadian-Jewish community. The primary question that concerns this article is what is the current level of adherence to the kosher laws among the Jews of Windsor-Essex County? This main question spurs other related questions: Which kosher food practices are largely followed? Which practices have been marginalized? To what degree do people eat treyf or non-kosher foods, and how is that rationalized? Is there a correlation between the participant’s kosher practices and demographic factors, such as age or education level? In 2019, a sample of 50 members from this community were interviewed about their religious practices and beliefs. Keeping the kosher laws is a matter that requires more study, particularly as it applies to contemporary Canadian Jewish life. These individual interpretations will affect one’s decision either to retain or reject the kosher laws in their own lives. Since the specifics of kashrut are not commonly understood, there is space available for Jews to interpret the kosher laws based on their own understanding. The rationale for this statement is the kosher laws or kashrut which are intended to regulate the Jewish diet. Diner ( 2001), a historian of American Jewry, states that “Judaism itself put food in the foreground” (178).
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