Israel’s restaurants are going kosher, and the owners say it pays. Veteran non-kosher institutions like Jerusalem’s Dolphin Yam and Herzliya’s Bnei HaDayag have dropped seafood, closed on Shabbat, and taken on rabbinic supervision to reach a market in which 68% of Israeli Jews keep kosher to some degree. The trend runs in the opposite direction in America, where only 17% of Jews keep a kosher home. Meanwhile, non-Jews account for close to 80% of kosher food sales in the United States, and a growing number of Christians are adopting the dietary laws of Leviticus as a way of “eating biblically,” a practice with roots stretching back to Noah’s ark.
For decades, Dolphin Yam was the place in Jerusalem to eat shrimp. The restaurant operated for more than 20 years on Salah a-Din Street in eastern Jerusalem, near Herod’s Gate, moved to Tel Aviv in 1988 and returned to central Jerusalem in 2000, serving as one of the few spots in the capital offering lavish seafood dishes. It holds a unique place in the city’s history as the first and last Jewish restaurant to open in eastern Jerusalem in 1967, immediately after the city’s liberation.
Then the shrimp came off the menu. On January 6, 2025, the restaurant founded by Dalia and Shraga Rosenzweig reopened as a kosher establishment that is closed on Shabbat. The owners explained the move in a statement, saying that for 57 years they had “served only part of the population.” They said the goal was to open their doors to the widest possible public, including those who keep kosher.
The decision had a wartime backstory. When the Iron Swords war broke out, Dolphin Yam, like restaurants across the country, wanted to cook meals for soldiers at the front but ran into a wall because it lacked kosher certification.
Not every regular was pleased. Customers posted angry responses online, one calling the change “another blow to secular Jerusalem.” Some had been dining there for 25 years and lamented the loss of a weekend option, along with the familiar menu.
Dolphin Yam is far from alone. In Herzliya, the veteran marina fish restaurant Bnei HaDayag received a kosher certificate, closed on Shabbat and dropped seafood from its menu after roughly 22 years as one of the marina’s best-known non-kosher institutions. It now operates under the mehadrin (stringent) supervision of the Badatz Beit Yosef.
In Kiryat Ono, the switch to kosher cost a pizzeria its name. The owners of Pizza Artzieli, a Tel Aviv favorite, announced this summer that they were parting ways with the franchisees of their Kiryat Ono branch, who had asked to make it kosher. Chef Juan Masel said kashrut is not part of the chain’s identity, and the owners released the franchisees from their contract and their brand. Franchisee Shai Lahav was blunt about the business logic. “We’re in an area that really demands kashrut,” he told Calcalist, pointing to large employers like the Mekorot water company and a nearby college, and saying the branch was losing a great deal of business. The partners are keeping the same product, now under kosher supervision and a new name.
The numbers explain the trend. According to the Israel Democracy Institute’s 2024 Religion and State Yearbook, 68% of Israeli Jews keep kosher to some degree, with 45% saying they always observe and another 23% saying they usually do. More than a third (35.5%) eat only at businesses that hold a kosher certificate they trust. A restaurant without a hechsher (kosher certification) writes off a huge share of the market before the first customer walks through the door. The Israel Restaurant Association estimates the country has about 6,000 full-service restaurants, a quarter of which hold a kosher certificate, rising to 60% in Jerusalem.
Owners who made the switch report the math works. In 2016, Ori Tal of the Zap Rest dining platform told Ynet that restaurants in Tel Aviv and Eilat that became kosher saw business rise by 25% to 40%. Tel Aviv restaurateur Lili Ben Shalom described the calculation in a 2018 interview with Ynet. She said the trade-off between opening on Friday and Shabbat and serving a wider public balances out, adding that “every second event wants a kashrut certificate.”
The kosher kitchen is booming in Israel, fading among American Jews, and quietly expanding among non-Jews who answer to no rabbi. That raises a question with deep roots: who were the Bible’s food laws meant for, and why are they drawing people the Bible never obligated?
The contrast with American Jewry is stark. Pew Research Center’s 2020 survey found that only 17% of U.S. Jews keep kosher at home. Among Orthodox Jews, the figure is 95%, compared with 24% of Conservative Jews and 5% of Reform Jews. The practice is shrinking. Between Pew’s 2013 and 2020 studies, the share of American Jews who reported having a kosher home fell by 5 points. Roughly two-thirds of Israeli Jews keep kosher in some form. Fewer than one in five American Jews keep a kosher home.
Meanwhile, non-Jews have become the backbone of the American kosher market. A 2009 Mintel survey found that 13% of American adults intentionally buy kosher food, yet only 14% of kosher buyers said they do so because they follow kosher religious law. Quality, healthfulness, and food safety topped the list of reasons. In her 2010 book Kosher Nation, journalist Sue Fishkoff calculated that of the 11.2 million Americans who regularly buy kosher food, only about 1.5 million are Jews committed to kashrut (the Jewish dietary laws), meaning at least 86% are not religious Jews. The Orthodox Union, the world’s largest kosher certifier, puts non-Jewish consumers at close to 80% of all kosher food sales.
For some Christians, the motivation is Scripture itself. The Seventh-day Adventist Church teaches a health message that expects members to follow biblical dietary laws, and it counted 24,372,139 members worldwide at the end of 2025. Among evangelicals and Hebrew Roots believers, the practice is known as “eating biblically.” The popular teaching ministry Torah Class teaches that eating biblically kosher means avoiding pork, shellfish, sea creatures lacking fins and scales, and larger animals without split hooves or that don’t chew the cud, while treating the separation of meat and dairy as a Jewish tradition outside biblical food laws.
The Bible draws the line between clean and unclean animals long before Sinai. When God commanded Noah to gather the animals into the ark, He already distinguished between them:
“Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee seven and seven, each with his mate; and of the beasts that are not clean two, each with his mate.” (Genesis 7:2)
Noah knew which animals were tahor (pure) and which were tamei (impure) centuries before the Israelites received the laws of Leviticus. Yet after the Flood, God granted Noah and all his descendants permission to eat every living creature: “Every moving thing that liveth shall be for food for you; as the green herb have I given you all.” (Genesis 9:3) The only restriction placed on the nations was the prohibition against eating flesh torn from a living animal, one of the seven Noahide laws.
The detailed dietary code came later, at Sinai, and it came to one nation. Leviticus 11 closes the list of permitted and forbidden animals by explaining its purpose: “For I am the LORD your God; sanctify yourselves therefore, and be ye holy; for I am holy.” (Leviticus 11:44) The Bible returns to the theme in Leviticus 20, tying food directly to Israel’s national identity: “And ye shall be holy unto Me; for I the LORD am holy, and have set you apart from the peoples, that ye should be Mine.” (Leviticus 20:26)
The Bible lays out the permitted animals with precision. For land animals, the rule is two signs: “Whatsoever parteth the hoof, and is wholly cloven-footed, and cheweth the cud, among the beasts, that may ye eat.” (Leviticus 11:3) Deuteronomy 14:4-5 names them outright: the ox, the sheep and the goat, along with wild game such as the deer and the gazelle. The pig has split hooves and fails the test because it does not chew its cud. For creatures of the water, the rule is equally simple: “These may ye eat of all that are in the waters: whatsoever hath fins and scales in the waters, in the seas, and in the rivers, them may ye eat.” (Leviticus 11:9) That single verse removes shrimp, lobster, clams and catfish from the Jewish table. For birds, the Bible lists the forbidden species in Leviticus 11:13-19 and Deuteronomy 14:12-18, headed by the eagle, the vulture and the raven. Because the ancient identity of several listed birds is uncertain, Jewish law permits only birds with an established tradition of being kosher, such as the chicken, the duck, the goose and the turkey. The Bible even permits certain species of locust (Leviticus 11:21-22), and Yemenite Jews preserve the tradition identifying them to this day.
Rashi, the 11th-century CE commentator, reads the opening of Leviticus 11 as a statement about life itself. The verse introduces the permitted animals with the word chaya (living creature). Rashi explains that the word is related to chayim (life), because Israel cleaves to God and is worthy of life, and so He separated them from impurity.
The Sages went further. In the Sifra, Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah taught that a Jew should not say “I find pork disgusting.” He should say, “I would like to eat it, but what can I do, my Father in Heaven has decreed otherwise.” Kashrut is an act of obedience and separation, and Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah insisted that the Jew keep it for exactly that reason.
Jewish thinkers have debated the reasons behind these laws for centuries. Maimonides, the 12th-century CE philosopher and legal authority, wrote in his Guide for the Perplexed (3:48) that the forbidden foods are harmful to the body, singling out pork as especially unwholesome. Rabbi Isaac Abarbanel, the 15th-century CE statesman and commentator, rejected the medical explanation outright. The Bible, he argued, is the physician of the soul, and the damage done by forbidden foods is spiritual.
Nachmanides, known by the acronym Ramban, focused on the birds. Commenting on Leviticus 11:13, he observed that nearly every forbidden bird is a predator, and taught that eating cruel creatures instills cruelty in the one who eats them. Sefer HaChinuch, the 13th-century CE work explaining the 613 commandments, builds on the same idea: the body is the instrument of the soul, and what enters the body shapes the person within.
The Talmud draws the sharpest conclusion. Leviticus 11:43 warns the Israelites against making themselves impure with forbidden creatures, using the Hebrew word v’nitmetem (and you will become impure). The Sages taught in Tractate Yoma (39a) that the word can be read as v’nitamtem, from the root meaning “dulled” or “blocked.” Forbidden food, they explained, produces timtum halev, a dulling of the heart that closes a person off from holiness.
Insert after the Daniel 1:8 paragraph, before “That line explains the numbers”:
The Bible records Daniel’s reward. After ten days on a diet of vegetables and water, “at the end of ten days their countenances appeared fairer, and they were fatter in flesh, than all the youths that did eat of the king’s food.” (Daniel 1:15) Two verses later, God granted Daniel and his companions knowledge and wisdom, and Daniel understanding of visions and dreams.
The Sages placed kashrut at the heart of the Exodus itself. Leviticus 11:45 follows the dietary laws with the words, “For I am the LORD that brought you up out of the land of Egypt, to be your God.” The Talmud in Tractate Bava Metzia (61b), cited by Rashi on the verse, teaches that God declared that had He brought Israel out of Egypt solely so that they would not defile themselves with forbidden creatures, it would have been reason enough.
The food laws also carry a messianic dimension. The prophet Isaiah, describing the final judgment in his closing chapter, singles out those who eat forbidden foods: “They that sanctify themselves and purify themselves to go unto the gardens, behind one in the midst, eating swine’s flesh, and the detestable thing, and the mouse, shall be consumed together, saith the LORD.” (Isaiah 66:17)
A striking tradition surrounds the pig itself. Rabbeinu Bachya, the 14th-century CE commentator, cites a midrash (rabbinic teaching) explaining that the pig is called chazir because in the future God will “return” it, l’hachaziro, to Israel. Commentators have wrestled with this for centuries, since Jewish law holds that the Bible’s commandments are eternal. The 18th-century CE kabbalist Rabbi Chaim ibn Attar, known as the Ohr HaChaim, resolved it by explaining that the law will remain unchanged and the pig itself will change: in the messianic era, it will begin to chew its cud and become a kosher animal.
The ultimate kosher meal belongs to the end of days. The Talmud in Tractate Bava Batra (75a) teaches that God will prepare a feast for the righteous from the flesh of the Leviathan, the great sea creature of Job and Psalms. The midrash in Leviticus Rabbah (13:3) describes a final battle between the Leviathan and the Behemoth, the mighty land beast, in which the Leviathan slays the Behemoth with its fins. The Sages raised an objection: an animal killed that way fails the requirements of kosher slaughter. Rabbi Avin bar Kahana answered with a verse from Isaiah: “For instruction shall go forth from Me” (Isaiah 51:4), teaching that in the messianic era, God will reveal a renewed understanding of His law.
The prophet Daniel lived out this principle in the court of Babylon. Surrounded by royal delicacies, “Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the king’s food, nor with the wine which he drank.” (Daniel 1:8) A Jew in exile held on to his table as the line between himself and the empire around him.
That line explains the numbers. In Israel, where Jews are sovereign in their land, two-thirds of the Jewish population keeps kosher in some form, and restaurant owners are rebuilding their businesses around it. In America, where Jews live as a minority among the nations, the practice is eroding outside the Orthodox community.
And the nations are watching. Millions of non-Jews reach for the kosher symbol, and Christians who owe no obligation to Leviticus are choosing to eat by its rules. The prophet Zechariah saw exactly this: “Thus saith the LORD of hosts: In those days it shall come to pass, that ten men shall take hold, out of all the languages of the nations, shall even take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying: We will go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.” (Zechariah 8:23)
The restaurants of Jerusalem and Herzliya are taking the shrimp off the menu because the Jewish people in their land are returning to the table God set for them at Sinai. The nations are following.
