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By Daniel Estrin

No, the animals in Israel aren’t Jewish. But their owners are. So, according to the Israeli rabbis who certify kosher food, if you’re a devout Jew, you’re not only prohibited from eating grain. So that means you can’t eat food that came from an animal that ate grain. So what’s the solution? Put the animals on a Passover diet.

“This is not hay,” said Ilan Reitish, a dairy farmer at a kibbutz near Jerusalem. “It’s corn. And other stuff that it’s not wheat. It’s something else that looks like wheat. But its not.

Reitish’s cows provide milk for Israel’s largest dairy producer. A week before the holiday, he rounds up the wheat-based feed he usually feeds his cows — and gives them a mix of corn and alfalfa-based feed instead.

Reitich isn’t religious. But a big chunk of the market in Israel is religious — and only buys kosher for Passover milk on the holiday. He’s also stopped feeding his cows one of their favorite foods — chicken manure.

“They cannot eat chicken manure in Passover — because you don’t know what the chickens eat,” Reitish said. “That’s why no one takes chances.”

Daniel Estrin: “Do they like the Passover food?”

“They don’t like it,” Reitish said. “Cows need to have all the time the same kind of food. If you change it, the bacteria have to change too, takes time. So, they have problems. They have problems, they have gasses.”

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Flatulence is no excuse for irreverence. Israeli cows have been made to keep a Passover diet for decades. But each year, rabbis re-examine the biblical prohibition on eating grains during Passover … and sometimes they harden their interpretation. This year, one leading rabbi said that cow’s usual Passover feed isn’t good enough.

“I dare say that past dynamics show that one isolated stringency introduced one year will become a trend next year,” said Rabbi Uri Regev, who direct Hiddush, an organization that promotes religious freedom in Israel. “I suggest we’ll see, other kashrut authorities will feel that they can’t be outdone by this stringency.”

Things are different in the US. Most American Kosher certifiers don’t require their animals to give up grains for the holiday. But some observant American Jews do buy special kosher for Passover pet food. There is even some who don’t let their kids feed the animals at the zoo on the holiday, because you can’t touch pellets that aren’t kosher for Passover. That isn’t a problem at Israeli zoos.

“Today we are preparing the zoo for Passover,” said Dr. Amelia Turkel, the curator of the Safari Park in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv. “And that means we must do a very through spring cleaning in every single department of the zoo.”

Turkel said they wash down the animal bins and replace their normal food with special Passover pellets. They also drain out the penguin and bear pools. Then they get a final approval that there are no errant grains lying around.

Turkel said Rabbi Katz a rabbi who comes to the zoo to see that all the preparations for Passover are correct. The lions and tigers and bears only eat meat, so they don’t have to give up grains. Who does?

Turkel said elephants giraffes, hippos rhinos, zebras, different kinds of antelope give up grains. And the chimpanzees get a special treat. Zookeeper Yael Baker said they go bananas for the Matzah, the flat Passover wafer.

“We’re gonna throw a few piece of matzah into the chimpanzees enclosure … you can see that as soon as I opened a package of matzah, all came running towards me waving their hands that they want some,” Baker said. “So you can see that they have absolutely no problem with eating matzah.”

Well, except for the stomach aches. The Turkel said the chimps sometimes get constipated from the Passover food. But as Jews who follow the weeklong Passover diet of unleavened foods know, that problem isn’t limited to the animals.