Penina Pie.
I remember it well;
One of my best friends in Israel, Penina Konforti, went to study in order to be a professional confectioner. The place of study was at the Dan hotel in Tel Aviv and her teachers were the best in the country. Every Sabbath after our service in Tel Aviv we would go south to Gan Yavne and spend the rest of the day with our friends.
We lived in Tel Aviv back then, so for us to go to our friend’s home was like going to be in the country side. We both had daughters the same age and we all loved this time of rest and fellowship with people that we communicate easily with.
Every Sabbath Penina had prepared three different luxury cakes for us to test. They were all beautiful to look at and the tastiest cakes you can imagine…..Penina wanted to know our opinion about how they looked, how they tasted, if they were too sweet etc.
After she finished her studies she opened a confectioner’s shop at her house and later moved into new facilities in one of the shopping centers close to her house.
Our family left Tel Aviv and moved to Gan Yavne. Penina’s girl and my oldest girl are the same age. They went to the same kinder garden and class at school and every afternoon they would spend in my house.
One day we woke up to a new and strange reality. Someone had put up posters all over Gan Yavne with Penina’s picture on them. They were warning people from buying cakes at her shop claiming that she was a missionary “hiding” behind her shop. Rumors had it that she prepared the dough at the “priests” home and that she mixed “pig’s blood” in her cakes.
Few people had known that Penina was part of the Messianic fellowship before this happened. Now people came to ask what her faith was about and to express that they did not agree with what was happening, but she also lost many of her customers who decided to believe in the lies of some of the religious Jews in Gan Yavne. The nicest thing that happened was that the friends of her children went to take the posters down the same afternoon.

Since this first act of persecution Penina has been haunted by the religious Jews both in Gan Yavne and in Ashdod. More posters have been put up and small papers with warnings on them have been copied by the thousands and put in people’s mail boxes.
The Rabbis have refused to grant her a “kosher certificate”.
Penina finally decided to bring her case to court. I could assist with a “nice collection’ of posters, letters and everything that had been said or printed about her since this first event.( I collected the originals as they were being“published”)
Israeli bureaucracy is slow and her case has been moved through different court levels until it reached the Supreme Court.
Last Sabbath we celebrated that finally, after all these years, she got support from the court which ruled that there is no reason why she should not get a “kosher certificate” and which decided that the rabbis will have to pay all the court expenses.

So we have celebrated for one day, but that does not mean that the problems are over…….

Elin Elkouby