LAKEWOOD, Pa. — In the woods here on Tuesday, campers stood in a line holding quails, feeling their warm bodies and beating hearts in their hands.
“Guys, do not bond with your birds,” Hillie Ackerman, 16, a camper from Brooklyn, warned his friends.
The birds were about to be slaughtered.
One by one, the boys handed the quails to a shochet, a Jewish slaughterer, who took a knife, its sharpness tested earlier against his own fingernail, and sliced the birds’ necks.
For a second, each quail shuddered, then went limp. The slaughterer tossed it into a plastic tub that quickly become splattered with blood.
“Next, next,” he said.
By the time darkness descended, the campers here at Yagilu Wilderness, an Orthodox Jewish summer camp for boys in the Poconos, in northeast Pennsylvania, had collected the carcasses of more than 120 freshly killed quails, partridges and ducks….
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