The Manischewitz company, which we Americans all grew up associating with Yiddish-speaking bubbys and matzoh-ball soup, is now owned by a couple of guys from Casablanca who are more likely to be eating fava bean soup and matbuchah at their Yom Tov meals. But they are still king of the machine matzos, so some things never change.
When my children were younger they used to go on yearly pre-Pesach class trips to visit a matzoh bakery. It sounded like such fun that I wished I too could board those yellow school buses and join them to go shuffling through rooms ringing with the clatter of wooden dowels watching strong-armed matrons slap down the dough and roll it out. Then there’s the thrill of seeing the matzos emerge triumphantly on a paddle from the fiery furnace charred and brittle in a room stiflingly hot and redolent of baking dough.
Well I finally got my tour.
We visited the Manischewitz plant in Newark New Jersey the largest and perhaps the oldest continuous manufacturer of machine matzoh in the world (the company reached its meah v’esrim birthday — 120 years — in 2008).
You might say the Manischewitz company owes some of its good health despite its advanced age to the industrial equivalent of receiving a brand-new mechanical heart: as of 2006 the company rebuilt its entire matzoh-making apparatus to create a super efficient and halachically sound matzoh-making environment worthy of the twenty-first century. The company claims that you could circle the globe twice with the amount of matzoh Manischewitz churns out every year which is produced in a plant the size of four football fields.
Meir the photographer and I locate the factory in an industrial zone so close to the Newark airport that every passing plane seems to fly low enough for us to reach up and touch. The next thing we notice getting out of the car and sniffing the air is the heimische smell of … chicken soup! Turns out consommé production is in full force today and its fragrance sure beats some of the other smells around that particular stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike.
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