Israeli sturgeon farm to produce caviar - but is it kosher?

Paul Eccleston, The Telegraph 28 Aug 08;

Israeli scientists have paved the way for a possible kosher caviar. After 15 years of research they have established a sturgeon farm where fish are bred to produce the eggs for caviar.

A company, Caviar Galilee, has been set up at Kibbutz Dan in northern Israel and expects the industry to be worth more than $7m per year by 2010.

The Caspian Sea close to the former USSR and Iran has traditionally provided most of the world's caviar but over-fishing and pollution brought the wild sturgeon to the brink of extinction.

Ten years ago CITES (Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Flora and Fauna) warned of the extinction threat and since then there has been much tighter control and regulation of the caviar trade.

Despite warnings that beluga sturgeon stocks in the Caspian have declined by as much as 90 per cent CITES earlier this year allowed some permits to harvest the fish.

Prof Berta Levavi-Sivan of the Hebrew University's Robert H Smith Faculty of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Quality Sciences and Dr Avshalom Hurvitz began rearing the fish eight years ago when they brought fertilised sturgeon eggs to Israel from the Caspian.

It takes eight to 15 years for the female sturgeon to reach maturity and start producing eggs, while the male sturgeon matures after four or five years.

Before the age of four, it is impossible to tell the gender of the fish and an endoscopy is carried out on the fish annually.

Once the sex of the fish is determined, they are then separated. Male sturgeon will be sold as fish on the market, while the female sturgeon will be kept in order to produce caviar.

Dr Hurvitz, who is a member of Kibbutz Dan, said they had learned how to breed the fish artificially in ponds and had succeeded in bringing the female fish to maturity at a much younger age to produce the valuable black roe.

While there is significant demand for caviar in Israel among the country's Russian population, the company aims to expand markets in Europe and north America.

Sturgeon - and caviar - is not generally considered to be kosher, due to the fish's apparent lack of scales. Kosher fish must have both fins and scales in order to be deemed kosher.

But, Prof Levavi-Sivan, said "If you ask me, it's kosher! I can even prove it has scales," she said, insisting that the sturgeon does have tiny scales which can be seen using magnifed 3D images.

A number of Jewish sources - including the 13th century Jewish rabbi and scholar Moses Maimonides - approved the kashrut (dietary law) of a fish called the esturgeon but it has yet to be determined whether this is the same fish as the sturgeon.