It’s Kosher to Be Kosher Again : Dietary rules: Jewish baby boomers are returning to orthodox lifestyles, and sales of the specially prepared foods are soaring.

TEANECK, N.J. —  A kosher craze spreading across the country has added a new word to the marketing lexicon.

Fruppie. That’s a Jewish yuppie who is fromm , the Yiddish word for religious.

And rabbis, sociologists and marketing consultants say the number of fruppies is growing as Jewish baby boomers return to their orthodox religious roots after experimenting with and rejecting other lifestyles.

“Orthodox Jews today are far more visible than they were 10 or 15 years ago. They’ve come out of the shtetl ,” says Steve Ostrow of Middletown, N.Y., who recently published a guide to 850 kosher restaurants in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

One of the measures of their growing numbers is a surge in sales of kosher foods.

According to figures from Lubicom, a marketing company that sponsors the International Kosher Food Trade Show twice a year in New York City, the number of different kosher products available has increased from 1,000 in 1977 to 20,000 this year. At the same time, sales ballooned from $290 million to $1.75 billion a year as companies from Coors beer to Pepperidge Farm have been awarded kosher certification.

Manufacturers pay an annual fee to supervisory agencies, the largest of which is the Union of Orthodox Congregations, to inspect their plants and certify products as kosher. Some have had to reformulate recipes, switch to kosher ingredients and buy new kitchen equipment.

“Certification has become a marketing tool,” says Lubicom president Menachem Lubinsky. “Beer is inherently kosher, yet Coors opted to try to obtain the symbol from the Orthodox Union.”

But Lubinsky notes that only 1.5 million consumers of the 6 million who buy kosher products are Jewish. Another 1.5 million are Muslims and Seventh-day Adventists, whose religions also forbid eating pork. The rest are vegetarians and others who buy kosher food because they think it’s healthier than non-kosher food.

“I, as a marketer, am astounded,” Lubinsky says. But, he adds, “It’s consistent with the yuppie lifestyle. People are entertaining more. They’re going out to eat more.”

“Jews are the most affluent ethnic group in America,” says Queens College sociologist Steven Cohen. “When you combine affluence with education, you get upper-class and upper-middle-class tastes.”

Preparation of kosher food at home also has opened new markets.

In Teaneck, a medium-sized suburb of New York City that is home to about 1,500 Orthodox Jewish families, the latest fad is kosher kitchens.

For between $20,000 and $125,000, an ordinary kitchen can be remodeled to make it easier to follow the dietary rules of kashrut, which requires the complete separation of dairy and meat products, from preparation to eating to cleanup. Families often buy double sets of appliances, sinks and kitchen utensils.

“I wanted two dishwashers and more counter space, and I didn’t want to knock down walls,” says Basheva Goldberg, who remodeled in 1984. “I had to compromise on nothing.”

Goldberg called Lingold Design and Construction in Queens, N.Y., and has since collaborated with owner David Linzer on dozens of kosher kitchen projects throughout northern New Jersey, New York and Connecticut.

Linzer takes care of the nuts and bolts while Goldberg, a teacher of Jewish adult education, tells him what observant Jews want in a kitchen.

Exotic kosher food was born on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1959 when Solomon Bernstein, the founder of Bernstein-on-Essex kosher restaurant, decided to substitute veal for pork to make a kosher egg roll.

The repertoire was soon expanded with the help of Chinese chefs to include other popular Cantonese dishes, with chicken and veal replacing non-kosher shrimp and pork, said Bernstein’s grandson, Ira Rosenfeld.

From that humble beginning, kosher restaurant fare has come a long way from the borscht, chopped liver and chicken schmaltz that were staples of the Russian and Eastern European Jewish shtetls , or villages, before World War II.

While the greatest concentration of kosher restaurants is in New York City, more than 30 have opened in Los Angeles in the last five years, according to Ostrow, the guidebook writer. And new kosher eateries are popping up in Atlantic City, Miami, Chicago, San Francisco and Brookline, Mass., he said.

Under the many rules spelled out in the Torah and the Talmud, animals that qualify as kosher must be killed by specially trained rabbis. These shohets slit the animal’s throat to minimize its suffering and inspect the organs to ensure that they are disease-free. From animals that pass the rigorous inspection comes glatt kosher meat, the highest designation of purity in the kosher universe.

About 10% of the 5.9 million Jews in the United States are Orthodox, according to the American Jewish Committee. Cohen estimates the kosher-keeping population at between 500,000 and 1.8 million, depending on one’s definition of kosher.

Many Jews with only one set of dishes don’t feel comfortable eating non-kosher ham and bacon, while the most observant will buy only those dairy products labeled “cholov yisroel,” which means that the milking and the processing were supervised by an Orthodox Jew.

The most marked difference today in the American Jewish community, says Cohen, is that Jews across the religious spectrum feel more intensely Jewish.

“My grandparents who were observant gave birth to parents who are less so,” he says. “Now our generation is more ideologically Jewish.”