A microbrewery in eastern Germany has found success with a new niche product: officially certified kosher beer.

The first 30,000 bottles of Simcha pilsner – a name that means joy in Hebrew – have sold out since being put on the market at the end of April, said Wilfried Gotter, a spokesman for the new product.

Brewed under the strict Bavarian purity laws with only water, hops, grain, and yeast, almost all German beer is technically kosher – fit for consumption according to Jewish law.

But Simcha goes one step further, having Berlin Orthodox Rabbi Yitshak Ehrenberg oversee the brewing and bottling process and give it official kosher certification.

For very religious Jews the availability of kosher beer is tremendously important, Gotter said. The certification takes it to the next level.

Drinking the beer will take the consumer to the next level as well.

I can think of other brands that should be considering kosher variants of their beverage:

• Heineken: Shmeineken
• Budweiser: Ben-Weiser
• Fosters: Borschters (may need to add beetroot juice)

Anyone else got suggestions?
neoZionoid

Alcohol from mini bars and the nude photos in the fitness area have been removed and porn TV channels turned off in a hotel in northern Germany, which plays host to the Saudi soccer team vying in the World Cup due to kick off on June 9.

 

The three-time Asian champions went Saturday night, May 27, from Frankfurt airport to the Hotel Dolce, in the town of Bad Nauheim, which has been especially prepared for their arrival, Reuters reported.

 

The luxurious hotel is trying its best to shield the Saudis from all those western ways as they took up 59 of its 159 rooms for the finals.

 

“They will be able to watch 35 Arabic language TV channels in their rooms so they can see all the (World Cup) games in their own language,” Michel Prokop, the hotel’s general manager, told Reuters.

 

“We will leave the Pay-TV on in their rooms but the porn movie channels will of course be turned off,” he added.

Helmut Kohl’s chief assistant told WorldNetDaily the former German chancellor denies an Iranian newspaper’s claim that he agreed with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s assertion the Holocaust was a myth.

 

Kohl “rejects firmly the insinuated quotes,” said Lutz Stroppe in an e-mail.

 

“The quotations are completely fictitious and the story [is] without any basis.”

 

Stroppe did not respond to questions asking whether his office has contacted the newspaper and learned anything about the origin of the quotes.

Tehran, Iran, Mar. 06 ‚Äì Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl reportedly told Iranian businessmen in Germany that he agreed with statements by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that the Holocaust was a “myth”, the semi-official Jomhouri Islami reported on Monday.

 

The government-owned daily wrote that at a dinner gala with Iranian hoteliers and entrepreneurs, Kohl said that he “heartily agreed” with Ahmadinejad‚Äôs remarks about the Holocaust.

 

“What Ahmadinejad said about the Holocaust was in our bosoms”, the former German chancellor was quoted as saying. “For years we wanted to say this, but we did not have the courage to speak out”.

 

Ahmadinejad caused an international furore last year when he publicly declared that the Holocaust was a “myth” and threatened that Israel must be “wiped off the map”.

 

His comments were supported by senior Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and former president Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

 

The country’s state-run media have systematically defended the position of the Iranian president and given extensive coverage to historians and “experts” who deny the Holocaust took place.

No, that did not appear in any news here in Germany so far. And I suspect it to be a hoax. It is true that Kohl did make some insensitive statements in the past, like that one on having experienced the “mercy of being born late”. But that was more due to his extreme clumsiness and sub-standard rhetorical skills. Generally, Kohl always stood very firm in the pro-Western tradition that Adenauer had established within the German Conservative party, and part of that always was to acknowledge guilt associated with the holocaust and the responsibility towards Israel that follows from it. It is virtually unthinkable that Kohl agrees with the Iranian president on any issue, and certainly not on the issue of Holocaust denial. But if anything surfaces in our news, I’ll keep you updated.

Hi Dave,
I am 100 percent sure Kohl didn’t say this. I haven’t found a rebuttal, but Kohl probably doesn’t know about the article. I will do more research on this and do a posting.

A Muslim cultural institute in Germany on Monday criticized Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad for disparaging the Holocaust, daring him to visit the Auschwitz concentration camp.

“In this place of horror he can again deny the Holocaust, if he has the courage,” a spokesman for the Islam-Archiv-Deutschland Central Institute told the German Catholic press agency KNA.

In recent statements, the hardline Iranian president has dismissed the Nazis’ systematic slaughter of mainland Europe’s Jews as a “myth” used to justify the creation of Israel and called for the state to be “wiped off the map”.

By denying the Holocaust, Ahmadinejad not only denigrated the Jewish victims of the genocide but also the 200,000 Roms and Arabs murdered in the “gypsy camp” of Auschwitz-Birkenau and other camps, the institute spokesman said.

The fact that the president of an Islamic state repeated Nazi anti-Semitism was harmful to the image of Islam and “a disgrace for all the world’s Muslims”, he added.

The institute, founded in 1927, is the oldest Muslim body in Germany. It has been dedicated to preserving the community’s archives since the eighteenth century and fostering relations between Muslims and other religions. 

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is not a man of peace, although his decision to withdraw troops from the Gaza Strip will have a lasting impact on the region, former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer said in a column to be published Thursday. 
 
Fischer, who was a trusted and active mediator in the Middle East before leaving office in November, wrote in the German weekly Die Zeit that he had always had an ambivalent take on the Israeli leader.

 

“He was not a man of peace, neither as a politician nor as a soldier,” Fischer said of Sharon, whose political future has been thrown into doubt since he suffered a major stroke last week.

 

Fischer noted that Sharon was “the political foster father of Israeli territorial expansion and with it the settlement movement” and was deeply skeptical about the Palestinians’ will for peace.

 

“He never seriously believed in the possibility of peace with the Palestinians, and certainly never with Yasser Arafat,” he said, referring to the late Palestinian leader.

Historians working in Germany and the US claim to have found a 60-year-old diagram showing a Nazi nuclear bomb.

 

It is the only known drawing of a “nuke” made by Nazi experts and appears in a report held by a private archive.

The deputy leader of the German state of Bremen resigned after pouring sparkling wine over the head of a homeless man in an apparent joke that went wrong. 

 

Peter Gloystein of the center-right Christian Democrats was caught on camera pouring a magnum of the wine over the head of stunned Bremen local Udo Oelschlaeger at the launch of German wine week Wednesday evening.

 

Oelschlaeger was standing next to the podium at the public, open-air event from where Gloystein poured the wine.

 

Gloystein, Bremen state economy and culture senator, said late Thursday he deeply regretted the incident and apologized to his victim. He said he had “misinterpreted” the situation but did not explain what he meant.

“I had a long and intensive talk with Mr Oelschlaeger the same evening. He explained his difficult life. We departed on friendly terms … If possible, I would like to help out Mr Oelschlaeger,” Gloystein said in a statement.

 

A Bremen culture ministry spokesman confirmed Gloystein had resigned from his various posts.