83 live chickens taken from a U-Haul left in Flatbush, volunteers say

Eighty-three live chickens came out of an abandoned U-Haul left on a Flatbush street Friday night, according to the animal rescue volunteers who emptied it. Dozens of other birds, already dead, sat stacked in crates in the same truck bed. Police put the time of the episode at roughly 8:30 p.m. and said the survivors “were removed to an undisclosed sanctuary.”

An NYPD officer phoned him around 6 p.m. with a description of the truck and the birds inside, said John Di Leonardo, who runs Humane Long Island. About 15 volunteers with the Kaparos Compassion Project left home in New Jersey and on Long Island once word went around, pulling up to the block roughly two hours after that call.

“When we arrived on scene, birds were in horrible conditions,” Di Leonardo said. Flies covered the crates, he said, and every bird was dehydrated and very weak.

Police searching for whoever left the Brooklyn truck

Officers are trying to identify the person who walked away from the vehicle, Di Leonardo said he was told. A sign fixed to the truck in photographs taken on the block reads “Kaparos To Go.” Citing safety, he would not name the sanctuary inside the city that took in the survivors.

Saturday afternoon found him on his way to a second Brooklyn location where another load of abandoned chickens had turned up. “There’s dead and dying chickens in a second ‘Kaparos to Go’ truck nearby,” he said.

What the Kaparos ritual is

Kaparos is an ancient practice in which a chicken is held live above the head during prayer and killed afterward, said Rina Deych, a Borough Park resident who has campaigned against it as an animal rights activist. Some ultra-Orthodox sects carry it out in the hours before Yom Kippur, which this year starts at sundown Sunday, Sept. 20. “It’s a very small percentage of Jews,” she said.

A different version swaps in a bag of money, lifted during the prayer and then given to charity, Deych said. She has spent 30 years making that case in Brooklyn communities, and a separate court effort to end the custom failed in New York in 2018.

On Saturday night, she said, people from her group planned to turn up at a Kaparos ritual in Crown Heights. They were not going to interrupt it. They were going to push strips of watermelon through the bars of the crates to the birds waiting inside.