With a Pinch of Salt

His career as the OU’s reigning expert on food production has taken him to 50 American states and 40 foreign countries, enabling him to identify thousands of ingredients (sans a chemistry degree) and tour a plant while pointing out where every pipe leads and what every piece of machinery does. He’s a sought-after lecturer on kashrus topics, too, whose shiurim were recently published as a popular sefer.

Blessed with razor-sharp sleuthing skills and a preternatural sixth sense for what the eye can’t see — and, he emphasizes, a heavy dose of siyata d’Shmaya — Reb Avri, as he’s known to kashrus mavens worldwide, is able to catch things that elude most other people. That, in turn, has enabled him to spare kosher consumers from serious problems they didn’t even know existed, and sometimes, to solve a manufacturing mystery, too.

Once, he inspected a huge chocolate factory which had two completely separate production lines for milchig and pareve, with two separate sets of equipment. The non-Jewish owner approached him with a problem he was grappling with: He kept finding between a hundred to two hundred parts-per-million (PPMs) of dairy in his pareve chocolate, which meant lactose-intolerant consumers could no longer buy his products. He’d hired expensive consultants to find the source of the contamination, but to no avail, and turned to Rabbi Juravel in desperation.

“So I’m walking through the place,” Rabbi Juravel recalls, “and looking at the various machines… There were three storage tanks, three sweco [filtering] machines, every pipe connected to the right machine — I checked it all. But one worker operates all three, and as the chocolate is going around and around in the sweco filter, some of it will hit the side and become solid. So he has a spatula to scrape the chocolate off the sides. And then I saw it — the spatula is in his back pocket, and he’s using the same spatula for all three machines, dairy and pareve alike. I said to the owner, ‘Marty, right there are your PPMs — and by the way, it’s a kosher violation too.’ He didn’t even give me a chocolate chip for solving his problem, but I think I made a kiddush Hashem. So you have to see the metzius and you have to have siyata d’Shmaya to be there at the precise moment when the worker walks by.”