Kapparot chicken ritual swinging on planes for Jews locked up in Melbourne, Australia.
A pilot from Melbourne, Australia, threw himself into the skies with 3 chickens on Sunday to perform a pre-Yom Kippur ritual that was in a different way out of reach of Jews locked up in that 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 meetings banned because of the coronavirus pandemic, those who practice the ritual have struggled to achieve it.
A Brooklyn organization is supplying chickens to homes (a photo in a New York Times article about low masking rates in Brooklyn’s Orthodox neighborhoods showed a guy holding a chicken, with no explanation for why).
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 total city is closed. Then, 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 carries 3 chickens, two men and one female. It’s classic for men to swing male chickens and women for chickens.
“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. “