Rabbi Nosson Dubin

Rabbi Nosson Dubin founded the Kosher Institute of America in 2019 and serves as its Dean. The institute opened with a course for people keeping kosher at home. The AKO Mashgiach Course came next, and it is now the standardized training that more than 35 agencies run in their own editions for their own mashgichim, with a database he built so those agencies can confirm who has completed it.

The institute began with a gap he kept meeting in his own work: plenty of articles, videos and books about kosher, and no formal training system behind any of it. Every agency trained its own mashgichim in its own way, and the depth of that training varied enormously. He spent a year writing a curriculum that any agency could adopt, presented it at the AKO conference in January 2020, and agencies on five continents have taken it up since.

He received his Torah education at Yeshivas Chaim Berlin and Yeshiva Torah Temimah, studied in Eretz Yisrael under Rav Tzvi Kaplan, and completed his learning at Beth Medrash Govoha in Lakewood. He serves on the executive board of AKO, the Association of Kashrus Organizations, the umbrella body for roughly 120 kosher agencies.

He is the author of Hatza’as Hashulchan, a full-length work on hilchos ta’aruvos, the laws of mixtures, which has become a standard text for semichah candidates preparing for their examinations. His shorter published works include a guide to the Shabbos kitchen for mashgichim and studies on modern mikvaos and techeiles.

New agency enquiries go straight to him. KIA remains a training center, though, and the boundary he set for it applies to him as much as to anyone here: agencies decide who works as a mashgiach, and questions of Jewish law belong to your agency’s rabbinic administrator or your own rabbi.