A Ritual of Repentance in A Parking Lot

JERUSALEM "Mommy, what happened to the chicken?"

For an instant, the question hung in air rank with the smell of animal pens, dirty feathers and blood.

The young boy with looping sidelocks looked up at his mother. She maneuvered a baby stroller through a gaggle of teenage American tourists gathered at the gate of a downtown parking lot, which on this day was among the most dangerous places in the world to be a chicken.

"They killed it," she said, as sweetly as possible.

In a city where the rituals of the Information Age and Biblical times exist in surreal close quarters, the chicken slaughter that precedes Yom Kippur, the high holy day when Jews ask forgiveness for their misdeeds, is something to behold for the religiously devout and the strong of stomach. It brings poultry and sinner together in a gesture of absolution -- a hopeful, sanguinary, cacophonous event witnessed over an afternoon hour on the eve of the most solemn day in Judaism.

The ritual, among the more awesome features of the Days of Awe -- the period of reflection between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur -- works like this: A person buys a chicken for about $7, then waves it in clucking circles above his head or enlists an on-site rabbi to do so. A prayer is said, symbolically transferring the person's sins to the chicken, whose throat is then slit. The meat goes to the poor.

The ancient practice is not a hit with modern animal rights groups, which condemn it. Some rabbis have also characterized the ceremony, which transpires over a few slapdash seconds, as a pagan relic. One senior Sephardi rabbi recently hinted that a monetary donation to charity might wash away sins equally well. That secular alternative is one that a growing number of Jews have embraced, though tens of thousands here still prefer the poultry.

At 3 p.m., a thick crowd eddied around the covered stalls of the Mahane Yehuda market, a frenzy of last-minute shopping before Yom Kippur shut the city down. Tucked behind stone walls, the sacrificial site could be smelled long before seen. Shoppers hurried past, leaving a group of tourists standing outside the entrance.

The group filed into the transformed parking lot. Yellow crates of live chickens -- 2,500 in all -- lined the sides. Set among them were several low metal tables, each with a half-dozen large funnels poking from the top. Thousands of white chickens -- raised for slaughter, ritual or otherwise -- would end up head-down inside them before the twilight start of Yom Kippur.

"Okay," one of the teen tourists said breathlessly into a Nokia. "Guess what I am doing right now?"

Among the brave was Rebecca Greenberg, an 18-year-old from Philadelphia. A burly man with short sidelocks and a black skullcap handed her a chicken, instructing her to clutch the wings before raising it above her head. Her friends clicked photos with cellphones. Greenberg shrieked and stamped her feet.

"I'm never eating chicken again," she shouted, handing the fluttering bird back to the handler.