His boyish grin planted firmly on his face, Rabbi Mendel Reitzes enters some final notes on his palm pilot before setting off for yet another day of rounds. His turf: the New York/New Jersey area. As the Rabbinic Coordinator with responsibility for many OK-certified plants in the Metropolitan region, Rabbi Reitzes is always in motion.

Rabbi Reitzes was born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, forty-one years ago, just as the neighborhood was losing its Jewish character. When he was still a baby, his family moved to Crown Heights, a short distance west, and he has been a resident of that Jewish stronghold ever since.

Rabbi Reitzes attended Yeshiva Oholei Torah in Crown Heights, the flagship Lubavitcher yeshiva. After high school and studies in the bais midrash, he became a shaliach (emissary) of Chabad in Miami. He spent two and a half years there, helping build Yiddishkeit. Returning to New York, Rabbi Reitzes received rabbinic ordination from the Lubavitcher Rosh Yeshivah, Rabbi Yisroel Yitzchak Piekarski, zt’l, a leading halachic authority. Shortly after marrying Frady Yusewitz, Rabbi Reitzes began working at the OK Labs on a part-time basis.

He recalls the atmosphere at the time, when the OK consisted of Rabbi Berel Levy, of blessed memory, his wife Thelma, Rabbi Don Yoel Levy, and himself. “The office was located in a small room at the back of Rabbi Berel Levy’s house in Boro Park. Today I travel with a palm pilot; back then, we didn’t even have a copy machine. If I needed to make copies, I ran out to one of the local stores on Sixteenth Avenue.

“On Friday afternoon, Mrs. Levy would prepare lunch for us. I ate with the family.”

Rabbi Reitzes says that the homey feeling in those days endeared him to the Levy family and to the OK as an organization. He quickly became a full-time employee, and there is a warm story here as well. “I was saying Kaddish for my father at the time. When I first started at the OK, Rabbi Berel Levy wanted me to travel out of state to inspect certain facilities, but I told him I could not do so, since it would mean missing minyan and the opportunity to say Kaddish. I needed the income, but I would not abdicate the responsibility of saying Kaddish for my father. Rabbi Levy soon hired me full time, telling me he was impressed that I had been willing to forego earning money if it conflicted with my values.” While the other OK Rabbinic Coordinators travel around the world, Rabbi Reitzes’ responsibility for almost 100 New York and New Jersey facilities keeps him anchored near the tri-state area. His route is fairly routine, and he has devised a program for efficiently scheduling plant visits. The frequency of visitation for a facility depends on the nature of production there. Rabbi Reitzes is responsible for a wide variety of facilities. Among these are manufacturers of chocolate, flavors, flatbreads, bakeries, ice cream, jelly, spices, and fillings. Some of the more prominent facilities under his watchful eye are Virginia Dare Extracts, Shufra Chocolate, Zomick’s Bakery, Blommer Chocolates, and Golden Glow cookies.

Over the course of the last fifteen years, Rabbi Reitzes has witnessed many changes at the OK, with constant upgrading of standards. For example, the OK has always insisted on having a full, updated list of ingredients being used in a plant, but today this vital policy is enforced ever more stringently. A kosher certificate is not issued unless a current ingredients list has been submitted, assuring the consumer of proper monitoring. The OK’s peerless computer system has a massive database to store this critical information and cross-reference it as necessary. The program tracks every ingredient of every product, and the sub-ingredients of the ingredients, back to the source. Even Group One ingredients, which do not need a hechsher, are classified by company name and country of origin. If a problem develops with any ingredient, the system flags every product that includes the ingredient.

Rabbi Reitzes has seen the quantity of companies and products under certification leap exponentially. Concomitantly, the OK has grown from four people and a part-time secretary housed in a small room to an impressive building with more than thirty employees and hundreds of rabbinic affiliates in the field.

Rabbi Reitzes is firm when he says, “One thing has not changed, and that is the integrity of the OK. The size of the organization has grown, but the commitment to elite kashrus standards has always been there. And we constantly strive for improvement in standards. I am proud to be part of the OK family.”

To the outside observer, plant inspection can seem little more than examining the ingredients for their kashrus status. Rabbi Reitzes agrees that this is important, but he believes that there is a more basic element in kosher supervision. “You have to ‘feel’ the company,” he says. “What I mean is that you have to have confidence that the owner and plant supervisors are honest. Once you have established that integrity exists, working with the company is much easier. If you don’t have that confidence, you are better off staying away from the company.”

What does Rabbi Reitzes number among his key achievements? “I’ve succeeded in convincing many companies to make their products pas Yisrael,” he says. Many Jews will only eat baked goods that have been produced with some participation by a Jew — pas Yisrael (literally, the bread of a Jew). While a Jew does not need to be part of the entire baking process, he must have at least a minimal role. This generally entails having a Jew start the fire. In plants or bakeries where an oven has a pilot that is always lit, there is little difficulty with implementing pas Yisrael. Rabbi Reitzes (or one of the other OK mashgichim, or even a Jewish employee at the company) lights the pilot, which then stays on. Unless the pilot goes out, no further action is required to keep the products pas Yisrael.

However, most modern plants have an automated pilot, which is not on permanently and must be ignited at the start of each workday. In cases like this, it can be prohibitively expensive to have a rabbi come to the plant every day to light the pilot. Rabbi Reitzes developed a system whereby a heating element (similar to the burner atop an electric range) is placed inside the oven to assist in the baking. The element need only be ignited once, after which it remains lit.

There is an opinion that even leaving a light bulb lit in the oven is enough to allow one to categorize baked goods as pas Yisrael. OK policy is not to rely on a light bulb, because a bulb is not generally used for baking.

Rabbi Reitzes has also taken a leading role in having Jewish-owned companies sell their chametz for Pesach. Before the holiday, much of his time is consumed by this mitzvah.

OK Kashrus Administrator Rabbi Don Yoel Levy has known Rabbi Reitzes for two decades. “Mendel is dear to us as a friend and respected for his kashrus knowledge,” Rabbi Levy said. “We enjoy working with him and are proud he is associated with the OK.”

Eli Mandel is a free-lance writer.