Keeping kosher for Passover – in state prison

The state plans to begin offering kosher meals to observant Jewish prisoners in time for Passover, a prison system spokesman confirmed Wednesday.

The move comes while Maryland is defending itself in at least two actions over the lack of kosher meals at correctional facilities, one of which was argued on Wednesday in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The other case, in Washington County Circuit Court, was filed by an inmate at Maryland Correctional Institution-Hagerstown.

The spokesman, Rick Binetti, said the timing was pegged to Passover and unrelated to the pending cases.

“We’ll be ready and able to accommodate those who wish to keep kosher during Passover,” he said.

Binetti declined to give details of the policy. However, a lawyer for the inmate in the 4th Circuit case said Maryland has filed a notice in that proceeding, stating that its policy would be modeled on the Commonwealth of Virginia’s.

The lawyer, Sean Andrussier, said Virginia’s policy is extensive, dictating how food can be prepared and served and even training cooks in the kosher laws.

The state planned in 2006 to bring kosher food to religious Jews in prison but never did, Binetti told Washington Jewish Week last month. He told the newspaper that Gov. Martin O’Malley’s administration scrapped those plans and started fresh.

There are about 140 Jews in Maryland’s prisons, said Rabbi Herzel Kranz, a Silver Spring Orthodox rabbi who said he has been “bugging” O’Malley’s administration, and, before O’Malley, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.’s administration, to accommodate the needs of the few kosher-keeping Jews in state custody.

“They take away your freedom, but you don’t lose your First Amendment rights and you don’t lose who you are religiously,” said Kranz, rabbi of the Silver Spring Jewish Center.

He said the timing of the switch is significant.

“Even the most furthest-out Jew relates to Passover and wants to eat a piece of matzah,” he said.

Seeking accomodation

In the MCI-Hagerstown case, Richard D. Adelberg complained to the prison system’s inmate grievance office that the facility was not following his dietary restrictions, which call for no dairy, nuts, tomatoes or “green vegetables.”

Subsequent correspondence between Adelberg and the prison system refers to religious dietary restrictions. The inmate grievance office dismissed his complaint, and, later, an appeal.

Larry J. Feldman of Stahl & Block LLC, who now represents Adelberg in the civil suit, said he got a call yesterday from an assistant attorney general telling him that as of Passover, which starts the night of April 8, his client and others who request kosher food will get it.

Adelberg is in prison for use of a handgun in commission of a crime of violence, assault and reckless endangerment, Feldman said.

Meanwhile, lawyers for Scott L. Rendelman and the state of Maryland were set to meet Wednesday morning at the 4th Circuit in Richmond, Va.

Rendelman is a former Maryland prisoner, now in federal custody, who alleges he was denied any accommodation of his kosher diet.

According to filings in his case, he is an Orthodox Jew whose lack of food options in the state facilities caused him to lose 30 pounds in four months.

Rendelman argues in briefs that the two alternatives to the regular diet offered, a pork-free diet or a vegetarian diet, are not a good substitute for kosher because they don’t take into account how the food is prepared or its ingredients. He did not request certified kosher food, only that his food be served on paper plates and that he be given larger portions of foods he could eat, emphasized one of his lawyers, Andrussier, of the Duke University School of Law.

Under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000, which provides for a greater accommodation of inmates’ religious beliefs, the prison is required to make the small changes he requested, Rendelman argues.

Rendelman’s case is not rendered moot by either his transfer to the federal prison system, which provides him with kosher meals, or the change in the Maryland system’s policy, Andrussier said. Rendelman is appealing a federal conviction and worries that if it is overturned, he will go back to Maryland and again face few food choices, Andrussier said. As for the new policy, “a voluntary cessation by a defendant doesn’t moot a case unless” there is no chance of an about-face, he said.

Fears of favoritism

The state argues in its briefs that Rendelman’s case is, in fact, moot, and that even if it isn’t, the two alternative diets were a reasonable accommodation of Rendelman’s religious needs.

“The DOC determined that providing a Kosher diet rather than the current options of a pork-free meat diet or a vegetarian diet would be too costly,” the state’s brief says. “Additionally, the provision of a Kosher diet would be perceived as a display of favoritism among inmate religious groups and would generate unrest.”

Rendelman gained media attention last year when his sentence was enhanced because he sent threatening letters to a prosecutor, another lawyer, a judge, a White House staffer and then-President George W. Bush — and, after being convicted of those threats, two federal judges.

According to the state’s brief in the 4th Circuit appeal, “While incarcerated in the DOC, Mr. Rendelman made multiple requests for a Kosher diet. Many of these requests were accompanied by obscene threats of violence to prison employees and other officials.”