Kapparot ritual of chickens swinging on planes for Jews locked up in Melbourne, Australia
A pilot from Melbourne, Australia, took off with 3 chickens on Sunday to perform a pre-Yom Kippur ritual that was otherwise forbidden for Jews locked up in the city.
The kapparot, practiced through some Orthodox Jews, consists of swinging a living bird 3 times in its head and reciting a prayer to transfer sins to the bird, the bird is sacrificed and given to the poor.
This year, with giant gatherings banned due to the coronavirus pandemic, those who practice the ritual have struggled to achieve it.
A Brooklyn organization is providing hens to homes (a photo in a New York Times article about low masking rates in Brooklyn’s Orthodox neighborhoods showed a man holding a chicken, without explanation for the reason).
In Israel, where the government has imposed strict regulations on COVID-19 infections, kapparot is one of the allowed reasons to travel.
In Melbourne, the city total is closed. An enterprising philanthropist with access to a plane to carry a symbolic edition over the heads of all Melbourne Jews, flying with chickens in circles over the city.
The low-flight hour flight was reported through Dan’s Deals online, a popular low-budget online page run by an Orthodox Jew living in Cleveland. The site showed the trajectory of the flight over the city, with a dense set of circles over the city’s heavily Jewish districts, adding Caulfield and St Kilda.
According to Yeshiva World News, an Orthodox news service, the plane is carrying 3 chickens, two males and a female. It is classic for men to balance male chickens and female for hens.
“I don’t think anyone here thinks it might just be yoitze [having done their ritual duty] to fly over poultry,” a Melbourne resident wrote in an observation about Dan’s Deals. “But it was a really smart start, day. “