Yogurtland, a leading frozen yogurt chain, is following the lead of Dunkin Donuts, Baskin Robbins and The Coffee Bean and has launched its first kosher store, the Beverly Connection location in Los Angeles.

The store is under the kosher supervision of the Rabbinical Council of California, according to the Kosher Today newsletter.

Yogurtland’s self-serve frozen yogurt shops allow customers to approach a wall of sweet and tart yogurt flavors and a topping bar. Paying by the ounce, consumers can choose among 16 yogurt flavors to create their own frozen treat and top it off their way.

“Certified kosher frozen yogurt from Yogurtland will be a welcomed treat for the kosher community,” said Rabbi Yaakov Vann, Director of Kashrut Services for the Rabbinical Council of California.

All of Yogurtland’s flavors are produced in a kosher-certified facility.

Israeli restaurants and hotels are more interested n seeking kosher certification from the American-based Orthodox Union (OU) in order to attract foreign tourists, according to the Kosher Today newsletter.

It said that many American Jewish tourists generally are more familiar with the OU than Israeli rabbinic certifications.

The OU operates in Israel in an office near downtown Jerusalem and has several kosher supervisors.

Not all restaurants are willing to accept OU supervision. Kosher Today noted that the La Cuisine restaurant decided to forfeit its OU certification for Passover rather than agree to its requirements for proper cleaning of the facility before the holiday.

A New York Daily News headline writer needs a quick course in kosher dietary laws after an overly cute headline tried to get across the message that moose lasagna is not kosher if pork is used.

As most Jews and many non-Jews know, Jewish law forbids eating milk products and meat products together. Even if the moose meat were slaughtered according to Jewish law, mixing it with a cheese lasagna is as kosher as a ham on cheese sandwich.

The offending non-kosher item was pork, which the Daily News reported was found in batch sample of moose lasagna served up in IKEA stores in Europe.

The Daily News began its headline blurb with “Kosher wanted?” and then followed it with the report of  the discovery of pork, which is a forbidden food not only for Jews but also for Muslims, whose European population is more than 45 million.

The newspaper explained that moose meat is common in Sweden home of IKEA, but is not usually used in lasagna.

Poland’s Jewish community has about a one month supply of kosher meat left, following a ban on ritual slaughter that went into effect at the beginning of the year, Piotr Kadlcik, president of the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland, told the JTA on Monday from Warsaw.

The status of ritual slaughter in Poland became unclear in November when a Polish court ruled that the government had acted unconstitutionally with its 2004 regulation exempting Jews and Muslims from stunning animals before slaughtering them, as their faiths require.

The Jewish community and some legal experts say kosher slaughter remains protected by another law, the 1997 Act on the Relation of the State to the Jewish Communities in Poland, which states that ritual slaughter may be performed in accordance with the needs of the local Jewish community.

Poland’s Agriculture Ministry has said it will work to enshrine ritual slaughter in Polish legislation this year that is designed to streamline the way that Polish procedures correspond with European Union Regulation 1099, that went into effect in January. Regulation 1099 requires that animals do not experience “unnecessary suffering.” The European Union has said individual countries will have discretion on whether to allow or ban ritual slaughter, however.

As of now, ritual slaughter remains illegal and Polish prosecutors began investigating reports of the March 12 shechitah, or kosher slaughter, of a cow in the northeastern town of Tykocin after hearing about it from a county veterinarian in Bialystok.

Poland has about 6,000 Jews and 25,000 Muslims, according to the European Jewish Congress and the U.S. State Department, respectively.

The Doheny Glatt Kosher meat market controversy has reached the federal level, where the Dept. of Agriculture announced it is investigating accusations against Doheny owner Michael Engelmen that he sold meat that was not properly certified as kosher.

Rabbinical councils usually take measures in similar cases, and legal action against improper kosher meat certification is rare.

The controversy hit the headlines last week when a private investigator handed over to the Dept. of Agriculture videos and other material incriminating Engelman.

The investigator, Eric Agaki, said he launched his own probe several months ago after rabbis approached him with the claim that the prices for Doheny Glatt meat was “way too cheap.” Agaki then discovered that workers for Doheny allegedly put improperly certified meat in empty Glatt kosher boxes.

A group of Israel Haredi rabbis for the first time have placed cigarettes on the list of Passover goodies that need a special “kosher” certification, while the Chief Rabbinate blew smoke on the idea, declaring that poison is never kosher.

Every Jew, and many non-Jews, know that Jews may not eat anything on Passover that might have ingredients of grains that could ferment and be considered leavened. Ashkenazi Jews have an added restriction on consuming anything that contains “kitniyot” vegetables such as peas and corn.

Every year, many Jews come up with all sorts of a “humras” – a stringency. One authority forbids using balloons on Passover because they might have been coated with a material that is considered kitniyot.

Some Haredi Jews several years banned drinking water on Passover that comes from the Kinneret because someone may have dropped a piece of bread in the lake, or God forbid, a fisherman used bread as bait that fell apart in the water before a fish could grab it.

Two weeks, we reported that there is an argument between Rabbinic groups in the United States over quinoa, which is not a grain. One group of rabbis claims that winds in some South Americana field, where quinoa is grown, might blow a barley seed into a field of quinoa, and that single seed might not be sighted in packaging, leaving the quinoa not kosher.

And then there is the case of Jerusalem Haredim who rent out laundered “shrteimel” hats during Pesach because, who knows, maybe a crumb was stuck in somebody’s fur hat.

But cigarettes?

Leave it to the group of Beit Yosef rabbis to add it to their list of certified products, for which, of course, there is a fee for the label for three local cigarette brands.

A spokesman for Israel’s chief rabbinate responded, “Poison is not kosher. For all days of the year, not just Passover.”

Beit Yosef justified the kosher for a Passover label, using the old “when in doubt, be stringent,” argument.

Its chief supervisor Rabbi Yigal Ben Ezra explained that the kosher for Passover label is for a number of Israeli Haredim who won’t buy any products that are not labeled “Kosher for Passover.”

He said the British rabbis inspected the Dubek cigarette factory and determined that no leavened bread came in contact with the cigarettes, which must go down as one of the great non-discoveries of the year.

The two most widely-known kosher certification agencies are battling it out over whether the grain quinoa, a life-save for those on a gluten-free diet, is kosher for Passover.

The Baltimore-based Star K kosher agency has said that Quinoa is not “kitniyot,” one of the grains that Ashkenazi rabbis forbid on Passover, while the venerable Orthodox Union’s OU kosher division says it is.

The prohibition on eating kitniyot, such as peas, corn, and green beans, has been challenged by an increasing number of Jews in recent years. The prohibition is based on the lifestyle of 500 years ago when open sacks of legumes stood next to wheat in stores. If a tiny bit of wheat were to fall in the sack of legumes, it could ferment and cause the entire sack to be considered chametz and forbidden by the Torah to be eaten on Passover.

Lifestyles have changed, but the minhag, or custom, remains, and the rabbis explain that one should almost never cancel a ruling of Torah sages just because conditions have changed.

However, some have expanded the ban to include foods that were not in the original ruling, sparking an argument among rabbis.

Decades ago, many rabbis ruled that peanuts were kitniyot, until it was pointed out to them that they simply did not correctly understand the meaning of a legume.

Similarly, soybeans were not around 500 years ago, and many, if not most, Ashkenazi Jews do not even use soybean oil, even though the late Chief Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook allowed its use.

A recent book In Hebrew, “Without Fear of Kitniyot” and authorized by Hevron-Kiryat Arba Rabbi Dov Lior, discusses the rulings on prohibiting on Passover the use of certain kitniyot derivatives such as soybean oil. The author writes that those who think “it is good to be strict” do not necessarily receive a blessing for their severity.

Now comes quinoa, “the mother of all grains,” which by all definitions is not a legume and certainly not a grain,

So what could be the problem?

Well, it seems that in South America, where it is grown, a wind might blow a grain of barley into cultivated rows of quinoa. Barely, like wheat, is prohibited by the Torah for use on Passover,

That is enough for the OU to rule that quinoa is not kosher for Passover, while Star K totally debunks the reasoning.

“Rav Moshe Feinstein said we weren’t to add on to the rules of kitniyot, so I don’t know why anyone would,” said Rabbi Tzvi Rosen of Star-K, referring to the esteemed posek of Jewish religious law who died in 1986. “And what’s more telling of this ridiculous debate is that quinoa is a seed, not a legume,” he told JTA.

Quinoa is known for its high nutrient quality and as an alternative for those following a gluten-free diet. But quinoa is not a grain at all. It’s a member of the goosefoot family, and closely related to spinach and beets, making a very good substitute on Passover for the Torah-prohibited grains of wheat, oats, rye, spelt and barley.

That could change, however, with the world’s major kosher certifier refusing to give quinoa its Passover seal of approval.

Perhaps adopting the line of “when in doubt, be strict,” Rabbi Genack said, “We can’t certify quinoa because it looks like a grain and people might get confused. It’s a disputed food, so we can’t hold an opinion, and we don’t certify it. Those who rely on the OU for a kashrut just won’t have quinoa on Passover.”

Rabbi Rosen said the Star-K certifies only the quinoa that has no other grains growing nearby. This year, for the first time, the company sent supervisors to South America to supervise the harvesting, sifting and packaging of the product.

“Whenever there’s a new age food, there’s always a fight between kosher factions,” Rabbi Rosen said. “But we should be worrying about other things, like all the cookies, pizzas and noodles that are Passover certified but appear to be chametz. Quinoa is the least of our problems.”

The argument, which could be over “who calls the shots” rather than a pure understanding of kosher status of foods that are not prohibited on Passover by the Torah.

A French public school has stopped offering alternatives to pork in its cafeteria for its Jewish and Muslim pupils, and official said their solution is to be vegetarians.

The alternative meats were removed last week to lower the overhead of running the cafeteria of the elementary school of Arveyres, a small town near Bordeaux in southern France, according to the local radio station France Bleu Gironde.

Like many other French municipalities, Arveyres public schools began offering alternative meats to Jewish and Muslim pupils in the 1990s.

The school’s management said that out of a total of 180 pupils, 28 do not eat pork. The school said the students who don’t eat pork may switch to a vegetarian menu. “They have enough things to eat at the cafeteria, including proteins,” the school management is quoted as telling the radio station.

Southern France is home to France’s second largest Jewish community, as well as hundreds of thousands of French Muslims.

Laëtitia Rekaïka, the mother of one of the 28 children who do not eat pork, told Radio Monte-Carlo: “I don’t understand the decision: We’re not asking for halal or kosher meat; we only want a protein-based substitute.”