Record-Breaking Challah Bake

here are certain moments when we find ourselves marveling at the incredible lives we live as Jews. As the high dies down from the incredible Great Challah Bake, a prelude to the revolutionary Shabbos Project, we find ourselves experiencing such a moment.

Wednesday evening, October 21, the Grand Prospect Hall was set up to accommodate over 2,000 women, 2,000 challah doughs, and one record-breakingly long challah.

With the catchy slogan “We Knead You!” the Shabbos Project committee invited all Jewish women of Brooklyn and the surrounding areas to a history-making communal challah baking event. The event was spearheaded by the tireless efforts of Mrs. Chani Mandel of Project Inspire. Mrs. Mandel, who is actively involved with outreach, attending Project Inspire Shabbatons and accompanying the JWRP trips of unaffiliated Brooklyn mothers touring Israel for the first time, has been working for months to pull off last week’s incredible event.

Her enormous shopping list consisted of 180 dozen eggs, 525 5-lb bags of flour, 75 5-lb bags of sugar, 65 gallons oil, 42 containers salt, 200 cans of spray oil, 21 1-lb bags yeast, 4,200 oval aluminum pans, 2,200 8-oz water bottles, and 2,100 sports water bottles! She also had to organize minute details ranging from poppy and sesame seed packaging, and bigger efforts like going down to Be’er Hagolah and visiting each classroom with token bilkelach, as she invited the girls to the event. “It has just been an incredible, eye-opening journey of achdus,” Mrs. Mandel says.