Ritual Slaughter

Members of the Hungarian Orthodox Jewish community attend the kosher slaughter of a chicken during the Kapparot ritual, a custom in which the sins of a person are symbolically transferred to a fow,l in the basement of the orthodox slaughter-house in Budapest, Hungary, Friday Sept. 21, 2007. the day before Yom Kippur. The fowl is thought to take on any misfortune, which might otherwise befall a person in punishment of his sins. After the ceremony, it is customary to donate the fowl to the poor. Today Hungary’s Orthodox Jewish community counts only a few hundred people, while Hungarian Orthodox Jews numbered hundreds of thousands before the Holocaust. (AP Photo/Bela Szandelszky)