Sam Tobis never intended to open a Jewish bakery.

The New York native moved to the Bay Area 12 years ago to attend UC Berkeley. Like many other Cal grads, he stayed. And even though he hadn’t joined a synagogue or felt particularly tied to Jewish life, he gradually felt a longing: for the Jewish foods that seemed ubiquitous in New York, for the connection to his roots.

In 2017, with no real baking experience, Tobis purchased Grand Bakery in Oakland, a long-running kosher bakery that had closed several months earlier.

“It was a combination of nostalgia and insanity,” he says.

Nostalgia — for New York, for Israel — is behind a number of new or recently reopened Jewish bakeries in the Bay Area. They take many forms: a kosher bagel shop in Berkeley inspired by New York legend H&H Bagels; a bread bakery in San Leandro that makes unusually dark, shiny loaves of challah; a home kitchen in Santa Clara that delivers stretchy Yemeni flatbreads.

For many of these bakers, food was a second career — something they just had to do.

“There’s nothing like food from your home country,” said Doreet Jehassi, who started the Ma’lawah Bar last year. “It’s going back to your roots and enjoying the comfort foods.”

Jehassi, who is Yemenite Israeli American, quit her tech job to start her delivery-only bakery out of her Santa Clara home. It takes 18 hours to make the doughs for her two signature items: jachnun and ma’lawah. Both require stints of rolling out the dough; adding a thin film of fat; and folding, resting and repeating until many layers form, all techniques she learned from her mom.

Jehassi estimates that 85% of her clientele is Israeli or Jewish — people already familiar with these Yemeni specialties. But other bakers are finding a much wider audience.

At Emily Winston’s Boichik Bagels in Berkeley, long lines form daily for her chewy, malty bagels. In the last year, Iliana Berkowitz has quadrupled her wholesale accounts for San Leandro’s As Kneaded Bakery, a purveyor of stellar challah and bialys and also pointy baguettes and custardy porridge loaves. Ayelet Nuchi, who recently closed her 1-year-old Palo Alto bakery Babka by Ayelet but plans to reopen soon in Los Altos, was surprised to see her yeasted Jewish cakes become a hit with the Asian community.

Babka by Ayelet — currently only taking online orders — is the only American bakery Nuchi knows of to focus on babka. While most bakers just make chocolate or cinnamon babka, Nuchi creates unusual renditions like halvah, raspberry-cheese and Nutella.

Each loaf starts with a buttery brioche-like dough infused with orange zest and vanilla bean. It’s rolled super-thin and spread with a thick layer of filling — a recent experiment saw almond cream with slivered almonds and lots of orange zest — before getting twisted and baked. The result is stunningly layered and more moist than the breadier versions made elsewhere.

“You take the tradition and you upgrade it,” she said.

Nuchi remembers that when she moved from Israel to the Bay Area 20 years ago, she was unable to find much Jewish food at all. A turning point was certainly the 2012 arrival of Wise Sons Deli, which proved there was huge unmet demand for Jewish eats in the Bay Area, a region with 350,000 Jews — the fourth-highest concentration in the country. Now, Wise Sons’ pastrami on house-made rye, bagel sandwiches and classic sweets like babka and rugelach are available across six locations, including one in Japan — not to mention Wise Sons’ farmers’ market stands and growing wholesale business.

Nuchi and Jehassi say they’ve noticed more Israelis these days in the Bay Area, too, drawn to Silicon Valley after working in Tel Aviv’s booming tech sector. That trend coincides with the soaring popularity of Israeli food in the United States — a product in part of Israeli chef Yotam Ottolenghi’s bestselling cookbooks like “Jerusalem” and “Plenty” that introduced many Americans to the wonders of za’atar and tahini. Last year, Zahav, an Israeli restaurant in Philadelphia, won the country’s biggest food industry honor: the James Beard Award for outstanding restaurant.

Israeli restaurants have been opening in droves, such as Sababa, which has two San Francisco locations, and Oren’s Hummus, which has five restaurants in the Bay Area.

It’s easy to see why Israeli food has taken ahold of San Francisco. Isaac Yosef, owner of San Francisco’s Israeli and kosher Frena Bakery, noted it’s light and vegetable-forward — two traits Bay Area diners have been wanting more of. It also tends to be vegan-friendly — 60% of Frena’s menu is incidentally vegan.

And thanks to the domestic rise in Israeli cuisine — which draws from the traditions of Jews who migrated to Israel from North Africa, Yemen, Ethiopia, Syria, Turkey and other countries — non-Jewish Americans are increasingly aware of the immense diversity of Jewish food. It’s not just challah and black-and-white cookies.

“Israel is a melting pot of food. It doesn’t matter where you are from, there you are going to eat Yemeni food and cook Moroccan food,” Yosef said.

Sure, customers still wander into Frena and ask why there aren’t bagels and lox. But as soon as Yosef explains Frena is Sephardic Jewish — that is, from the Mediterranean as opposed to the Ashkenazi Jewish culture from Eastern Europe — those customers quickly understand and order one of Frena’s burekas, flaky Turkish pastries stuffed with cheese, or sambusaks, pita-like pockets baked in a brick oven.

At Oakland’s Grand Bakery, Tobis has been working to subtly evolve the 60-year-old legacy business. He recently added bagels as well as house-cured gravlax, though the staple items of challah, hamentashen and coconut macaroons remain prominent fixtures. Grand Bakery is solely a wholesale operation, but Tobis likes the idea of opening a cafe one day — it could expose Grand Bakery to more people beyond its core customer base of Jewish moms and rabbis.

Some of the Bay Area’s best new Jewish bakeries As Kneaded Bakery 585 Victoria Court, San Leandro. 510-924-7490 or www.askneadedbakery.com. Chewy bialys, with a center full of onions and poppy seeds, can only be found at the retail bakery, which opened in 2018. But As Kneaded also supplies many Bay Area grocery stores with gorgeous, crusty loaves of many types of bread. Fair warning: The challah is only sold Fridays and Saturdays. Babka by Ayelet www.babkabyayelet.com. The Palo Alto bakery closed in January after roughly a year, but its rich, moist babkas in different sizes and different flavors — including chocolate, halva and Nutella — are still available for online orders and delivery throughout the Bay Area. A new brick-and-mortar is planned for Los Altos. Boichik Bagels 3170 College Ave., Berkeley. 510-858-5189 or www.boichikbagels.com. The lines haven’t ceased since Boichik opened in late 2019. Fans say the bagels really taste like they were made in New York — a comment that rarely follows other Bay Area bagel spots. Most customers walk off with a bagged dozen or two, and there are also sandwiches loaded with lox, whitefish salad and more from this kosher shop. Daily Driver 2535 Third St., San Francisco. 415-852-3535 or www.dailydriver.com. Handsome, New York-style bagels are the ideal vehicle for Daily Driver’s excellent cultured butter and cream cheeses. The original location — a stunning, enormous operation — opened in the Dogpatch in 2019, while a kiosk in the Ferry Building followed earlier this year. Frena Bakery 132 Sixth St., San Francisco. 628-444-3666 or www.frenabakery.com. Modeled after an Israeli bakery, Frena debuted in 2016 with a focus on savory breads and pastries as opposed to sweets. Try stuffed puff pastries known as bourekas or one of the lunch-appropriate pockets, filled with options such as slow-cooked chickpeas or feta and olives. Grand Bakery 510-465-1110 or www.grandbakeryoakland.com. Reopened in 2017 as a strictly wholesale operation, Oakland’s Grand Bakery supplies more than 40 Bay Area stores with kosher treats like hamentashen, honey cakes and macaroons as well as bagels. It’s best known for pillowy challah. Look for products at Berkeley Bowl, Draeger’s Market, Mollie Stone’s and some Safeway stores. The Ma’lawah Bar www.themalawahbar.com. A delivery-only bakery started last year out of the owner’s Santa Clara home, the Ma’lawah Bar specializes in Yemenite-Israeli breads, including jachnun, a slow-cooked layered bread; kubaneh, a pull-apart yeasted bread; and lachuh, a spongy pancake. Don’t miss the namesake ma’lawah, which is flaky, stretchy and puffs up beautifully in a frying pan. Delivery is available throughout the Bay Area. — Janelle Bitker

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On a personal level, running Grand Bakery gives Tobis a stronger sense of Jewish identity. Purim is coming up, and he’s excited to make thousands of hamentashen, the triangle-shape pastries filled with jam that symbolize evil Haman’s hat — or ear, or pocket, depending on whom you ask. (Purim celebrates the Jewish people being saved from Haman.) Regardless, Judaism is manifested in its traditional foods: the round challah for Rosh Hashanah, the latkes and sufganiyot fried in oil for Hanukkah.

“One of the things I love about being a Jewish bakery,” Tobis said, “is making these foods that are meaningful.”

Janelle Bitker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: janelle.bitker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @janellebitker