Streit’s is closing its doors after 90 years of producing the trademark Jewish bread – it may not be the city’s fault, but it is New York’s loss

Earlier this month, Streit’s matzo factory announced it is selling its four converted tenement buildings and leaving New York City’s Lower East Side, 90 years after it opened in 1925. The neighborhood was once home to hundreds of thousands of Jews, not far from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and other large Manhattan manufacturers. Now, the area around Streit’s on Rivington Street is home to stores like Teany, the health food cafe owned by electronica DJ Moby.

Today, Streit’s is still owned and operated by the descendants of founder Aron Streit. The family expected to stay forever. For years, they resisted offers of tens of millions of dollars to sell the buildings. When the Jewish community left the Lower East Side and Streit’s stayed, the brand gained legitimacy from its continued association with the old neighborhood. With time, it became one of the most prominent matzo makers in the country.

Walking around the 80-year-old ovens, it seems miraculous the factory lasted so long. The smell of toast and smoke hangs in the factory air, where the same employees worked for many decades on increasingly ancient machines. “I thought we would be here a lifetime,” says Aron Yagoda, executive vice-president of Streit’s, and Aron Streit’s great-grandson.

Mae Ryan/The Guardian

It may be the city’s loss that the Streit’s factory is closing, but it is not necessarily the city’s fault. Streit’s seems to exemplify the lethal power of New York real estate developers and rising rents, which in the last year have claimed as casualties historic commercial landmarks such as Rizzoli Bookstore and Pearl Paint. In fact, this passing moment of urban history is much more the result of contemporary oven design, sales strategy at kosher supermarkets and Israeli labor market practices – in other words, the peculiar forces of the matzo industry that direct the workings of Streit’s itself.

Matzo is a central part of Passover, the annual Jewish holiday that commemorates the enslavement and subsequent escape of Jews in Egypt. In the Biblical narrative, the Jews fled in such haste that they could not wait for the bread they took with them to rise. During the weeklong celebration of Passover, Jews eat unleavened matzo bread as a symbolic reminder of the hardship of life in Egypt.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Making schmurah (meaning ‘guarded’) matzo in the 1940s. Photograph: Streit's family collection/Michael Levine

The production process at Streit’s begins with flour and water held in vats in the basement. Like everything that happens before baking, the flour and water must be handled by a mashgiach, or Jewish person schooled in kosher laws. Mayer Kirshner, the factory’s head supervising rabbi, monitors the basement. Only the Jews do baking, but the rest of the employees are from all over: Bangladesh, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Poland. “We’ve got the UN working here,” says Kirshner.

With Rabbi Kirshner’s approval, the flour and water are lifted two floors to the mixing room. There, mashgichim say prayers as they churn the flour and water into dough, keeping an eye on the clock: three or four batches must pass through in under 15 minutes, or else the baking process may exceed 18 minutes, at which point bread begins to rise.

The dough is then dropped through a chute back to the first floor, where it is flattened by rollers, perforated by a spiky stippler, and divided into rectangles by huge rotating knives. Streit’s has two of these cutting machines, one from 1939 and another from 1941.

Each feeds matzo dough into a nearly imperceptible two-inch slot of one of two massive 72-foot ovens heated at 700 to 900 degrees. The ovens, both from the 1930s, have been covered in cement insulation over the years. They evoke the bulky, handmade aspect of elementary school clay art projects.

Mae Ryan/The Guardian

Small levers manually control the heat of each section of the ovens. Yagoda remembers his grandfather Jack, Aron Streit’s son, routinely adjusting the levers in search of perfect matzo. “He did know how to bake,” says Yagoda, “but he loved playing with the oven.” Yagoda, who had been told by his sister Annie not to joke with reporters, is on the Streit’s management committee along with his cousin Alan Adler and Adler’s nephew, Aaron Gross.

Gross played wide receiver on the Georgetown football team and after college worked in horse racing stables. He likes a good rivalry. “We cross-laminate – overlap dough six times one way, six times the other,” he says. “Whereas the competition does only three; they pennystack it. Those layers create air pockets and when you cook [the matzo] there’s more of a snap to it. It’s less dense, less doughy.”

Matzos comes out of the 72-foot oven heated at 700 to 900 degrees. Mae Ryan/The Guardian

Gross spent a few years working in the factory, mainly the mixing room. He says the most difficult job is that of the pickers, who stand in front of the ovens collecting the sheets of matzo, breaking them into pieces, and placing them in cooling baskets. The baskets, attached to the ceiling by thick metal chains, revolve around three floors of the factory in a slow, circuitous loop. Visitors must duck around them to avoid being hit.

In recent years, the Streit’s machines have worn down. Both ovens used to produce 1,000 pounds of matzo every hour; now they don’t exceed 1,650 pounds combined. It’s been many decades since spare parts for either oven were readily available, and when something breaks the entire factory has to shut down while engineers remake an old piece by hand.

The ovens cannot be fixed; they also cannot be replaced. Even the smallest new industrial ovens are nearly quadruple the size of the machines at Streit’s, and wouldn’t fit in their buildings. “I don’t understand how everything in this life has gotten smaller – cellphones, cars – while matzo equipment has gotten a lot bigger,” says Yagoda. New machines are not designed for a place like Streit’s. “If a guy made an oven just for matzo makers, what, would he sell one once every hundred years?”

Gross, Yagoda and Adler plan to retain as much of the old production process as possible when they move into a new factory after Passover this year . They want to keep using New York water and convection ovens. But no matter what, the current system resembles that of 1925 more than it ever could the process that will replace it.

An early 1950s ad for Streit’s egg matzos. Photograph: Streit's family collection/Michael Levine

There are still a few elderly Jews left who remember the old days. One, Eugene Weiser, a stooped old man who would not give his age, dropped by Streit’s for a kosher lollipop. Like his father before him, Weiser is president of the nearby Chasam Sopher synagogue, one of the oldest in the city. “I remember Aron,” says Weiser. “Since I was a little boy I would come by and get a piece of matzo.”

Though the Streit’s factory will close, Streit’s certainly will not. Nationally, it is responsible for 30-40% of all matzo sales. Its market position is protected by a unique set of barriers to entry. Matzo workers, for example, must be educated in kosher laws. Machines must be specially altered for matzo production.

Most importantly, Streit’s and its main competitor, Manischewitz, were both founded during the great wave of Jewish immigration to the US, around the turn of the 20th century. Unsurprisingly, commemoration of the enslavement of Jews in the pre-Biblical era fosters a market of consumers who prize so-called legacy businesses. Yagoda believes this attitude will not change so long as there are religious Jews. “Matzo is in the Bible. That’d be a big recall. GM has a big recall; wait till they recall the Bible. We don’t want to live through that.”

The market is growing. Passover sales used to account for 80% of the Streit’s matzo business; today it’s only 60%. The change is due largely to health food customers who appreciate the simplicity of matzo’s ingredients, and who perhaps view the kosher label as approximately organic. “It’s a healthy cracker,” says Gross. “It’s unbleached, unbromated flour, which everyone wants now.” Gross has also heard from distributors in the south that churches buy matzo as an ersatz communion wafer.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Passover rush at the Streit’s retail store was an annual tradition; lines reached around the block by 6am on Sunday mornings. Photograph: Streit's family collection/Michael Levine

Changes to the market also bring challenges. Relatively cheap labor has enabled Israeli matzo companies to undercut Streit’s and Manischewitz. Even if many customers are loyal, they’re not always given a choice. According to Gross, during Passover, supermarkets frequently give away five-pound bundles of cheap Israeli matzo with purchases of $50 or more. They buy only a small amount of Streit’s for the few customers who will neglect their deal.

At the same time, the neighbors who used to flock to the Streit’s retail operation no longer exist. The store is often totally empty even when its door is open, an uncanny sight in Manhattan. Gross thought the solution would be a Streit’s cafe or bar. Russ & Daughters, the old Jewish gourmet store just a few blocks from Streit’s, opened Russ & Daughters Cafe last spring. Gross imagined they’d call their place The Factory Cafe, and that there would be tours of the production cycle.



It didn’t happen. A new retail location would entail rezoning, new tax designations, new insurance liabilities – great expense and risk. “We really have to worry about how we’re going to make matzo, moreso than anything else,” says Yagoda. This was the feeling of the 11 family shareholders, and Aaron came to agree. “Once we lost the retail presence, to use this as our flagship factory makes really no sense. I don’t think we could choose a more expensive place to manufacture, or a more inefficient, more expensive means of doing it.”



Matzos packages are spun together then loaded onto trucks in the Lower East Side. Shipping out of Manhattan has made Streit’s less competitive than other matzos manufacturers. Mae Ryan/The Guardian

The family won’t say what they received for their buildings, but they nearly agreed to sell for $25m in 2008, and Lower East Side real estate has only grown pricier since. Streit’s is not, however, merely cashing out. “I’d rather be the generation that moved Streit’s than the last generation of Streit’s,” says Yagoda.

The money from the sale will be spent largely on making Streit’s a stronger company. “Our goal is to go from the most inefficient, out-of-date facility to the most efficient, state-of-the-art facility in the world,” says Gross. As Streit’s decides not to turn into a charming old museum, it will, at least, retain the vitality of a business that wants to survive.