Yeshivah cooks dish up the secret sauce of their success — along with a heaping serving of story
Two flights up from the two batei medrash on Beth Medrash Govoha’s landmark Sixth Street campus is the yeshivah’s kitchen, where a mind-boggling 9,000 meals are pumped out on a daily basis. But while the sheer numbers are enough to get one’s heart racing, the man responsible for every morsel of food here seems surprisingly unruffled, sitting in a tiny office sandwiched between the milchig and fleishig sides of kitchen.
Eli Rand is at home here in the yeshivah; the Toronto native learned in BMG as a yungerman before moving out to Bensalem, Pennsylvania, 14 years ago to take advantage of the higher stipends the out-of-town kollel offered.
“I was looking to start working part time when I saw a sign that the Bensalem Kollel was looking for yungeleit. I figured if I moved out there, I could get in another few years of learning,” he explains, before winking and taking a long, mischievous pause. “This was before Adirei HaTorah.”
Ultimately, joining the Bensalem Kollel set him on a path that brought him right back to BMG — albeit in a different capacity than he could have imagined.
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