Jewish For Good Bakers Kick Into Gear for High Holidays

It’s 7:45 a.m. and, as on most Thursday mornings, the bakers at Durham’s Jewish For Good community center have already been working for hours. 

But today’s batch of challah—a traditional Jewish bread that the center’s kitchen staff bakes and distributes weekly to LocoPops, the Durham Co-op Market, and Jewish For Good members—looks a little different than usual: instead of the long, braided loaves that are typically eaten during Friday night Shabbat dinners, these ones are circular and dotted with raisins, a variation that comes during the annual High Holidays—Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year); Yom Kippur (the “Day of Atonement”); and the ten “Days of Awe” in between—to symbolize the cycle of the seasons and the hope for a sweet new year.

With Rosh Hashanah starting Sunday evening, the bakers at Jewish For Good are kicking it into high gear. By the end of the High Holidays, the three-person team will have baked more than 2,000 loaves of challah, as well as hundreds of other customary pastries.

Though its challah operation is one of the largest in the Triangle, Jewish For Good, which shares a campus with Judea Reform Congregation and Lerner Jewish Day School, primarily functions as a recreation and wellness center, offering fitness and aquatic facilities, volunteer opportunities, and social programs for kids and seniors.

But as marketing director John DeMartino remarks, it would be somewhat preposterous for the community center to call itself a “hub for Jewish life” without having some kind of culinary component, given the importance of food in Jewish culture.

“I can’t go home without being force fed,” DeMartino says about visiting his relatives. “When I go home, I get a tour of the refrigerator. Which is a pretty illustrative example of how food is central to the lives of Jews.” 

Indeed, the bustling Jewish For Good kitchen feels nearly identical to the kitchen at my Jewish grandmother’s house; as the bakers roll out thick snakes of challah dough, one kvetches about the thorny plants in his vegetable garden while another offers me a slew of random food items from the fridge and freezer (dehydrated pickles and watermelon slices; ice cream; a slice of honey cake). 

The kitchen staff’s cultural quirks and familial rapport is part of what makes their product taste so good, according to DeMartino.

“What we’re doing in our kitchen is an extension of what Jewish families do in their kitchens all the time,” DeMartino says. “We’re using machines that you might not have at home, but we’re putting the same amount of love and attention and thought into it.”

Baker Michelle Farmer-Gray joined the Jewish For Good team after years of making her own challah.  

“I was making a lot at home, but I wanted to make more,” Farmer-Gray says. You bake challah with your head, your heart, and your hands. [At Jewish For Good], you really understand the meaning and the purpose of it, and the amount of care and love that goes into doing it for the community.”

For the Triangle’s small but hungry Jewish population, many of whom live far away from family members and are faced with a limited array of local Jewish food purveyors, the community center’s fresh-baked challah loaves are a godsend.

Ahead of Yom Kippur, Jewish For Good is offering a number of classic dishes in addition to challah for pre-order, including kugel, a dense egg noodle casserole baked in a sweet custard. 

Kugel is hard to describe—it’s basically a dessert masquerading as a pasta side dish—so I ask baker James Hepler if he can help me put words to it.

“Kugel one of those things where the best you ever taste will rarely come from a restaurant,” Hepler says. “It’ll come from someone’s house or a social gathering.”

The Jewish For Good kitchen, then—closer to a home than a restaurant—promises to serve up one of the finest.

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Follow Staff Writer Lena Geller on Twitter or send an email to [email protected].