The Cow Story

My father grew up in Novozlatopol, a Jewish agricultural shtetl, population 1,000, in Southeastern Ukraine. He recently passed on the following tale: There was some rule in ancient Israel that the owner of a cow had to, after feeding it for one year, donate the first male calf of this cow to the Temple. In Novozlatopol, the tradition was that the calf had to be donated not to the shule but to the Cohanim. A nice racket.

Once in Novozlatopol, a poor villager had a bull calf by his young cow, but was understandably reluctant to feed it for one year only to then donate it to the Cohanim; more specifically to the oldest Cohan in town, one Samuel Kagan, the town chazan. However, tradition also held that the gift calf must be perfect. So the villager cut the tail off his calf, rendering it imperfect and thus unsuitable for donation. According to my father, the local consensus was that the villager was justified. Kagan's reaction went unrecorded.

Photo of Shmuel Mattes Kagan - 1906