Rabbinate Warns Gentile Blood For Matza Scarcer This Year

Generous assessments have the number of missing children at close to 14,000, but the Hamas-run Ministry of Health balks at such inflated numbers and accuses those who promote them of purveying naked propaganda.

Jerusalem, March 11 – Israel’s Chief Rabbis issued an alert today that consumers should be prepared to shop for Passover matza earlier this year and possibly pay more, because of a shortage of non-Jewish children to kidnap, murder, and from whom to drain blood to make the special unleavened bread.

Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau and Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef co-signed a pamphlet with guidance for the springtime redemption festival of Passover, which begins on Friday evening April 3 this year. One of the main practices of the holiday involves the consumption of a cracker-like bread called matza, the preparation of which, according to various sources, has always involved kneading the blood of a ritually murdered non-Jewish child into the dough before baking. An apparent lack of such available children has made properly made matza harder to obtain, and the major supermarket chains fear they will be unable to maintain adequate stocks of it.

The source of the shortage remains a subject of hot dispute in the industry and government institutions involved. The Rabbinate itself attributes the situation to overzealous abduction and murder of Palestinian children by the IDF, which discovered a new method this winter of using liquefied and powdered Palestinian children’s bodies to efficiently melt snow and keep roads to West Bank settlements open. That practice, said the Rabbis, depleted stocks of Palestinian children from the villages and refugee camps in the Occupied Territories, and made matza manufacturers unable to abduct a sufficient number to meet consumer needs.

The army, however, denies the snow removal project has had any such effect on the limited availability of Palestinian children, instead noting that hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinians were washed into the Mediterranean Sea when the dams surrounding the Gaza Strip were opened following recent torrential rains. The exact number of children who disappeared as a result is not known, but conservative estimates by the United Nations puts the figure at somewhere between four and five thousand, based on attendance records at UNRWA-run schools in the Gaza Strip. More generous assessments have the number at closer to 14,000, but the Hamas-run Ministry of Health balks at such inflated numbers and accuses those who promote them of purveying naked propaganda.

The shortage mainly affects Haredi and religiously traditional families, but Passover is one the most widely observed festivals even among more secular Israelis, challenging them to find other solutions as well. Progressive Jewish congregations in the Masorti and Reform movements are sanctioning the use of fake blood to alleviate the crisis, but that ingredient also remains unavailable in the region even though months have passed since the last major expenditure of it this past summer.