On a blustery March afternoon on the Lower East Side, Streit’s matzo factory is running at full steam. Passover starts Friday night, and what’s a seder without matzo?
But this Passover will be the factory’s last.
The factory and retail shop, which for 90 years has stood at the same corner — Rivington and Suffolk streets, now the crossroads of hipsters and Hasids — is closing its doors this summer and moving to New Jersey.
“You get a lot of people who say, ‘I thought you left years ago!’ ” says executive vice president Aaron Gross, 40, a fifth-generation Streit descendent who joined the family business at 23, working the 28-man overnight shift.
“This is probably the last place you’d build a matzo factory today,” he says. “My great-great-grandfather [Aron Streit], who founded his bakery business in 1925, would say, ‘It’s about time.’ ”
A lot of matzo — 3 million pounds each year — has been churned out in four converted tenement buildings, each six stories tall.
And Rabbi Mayer Kirschner is there — with his own office — for six months a year starting every September, when he ensures that strict kosher rules are followed in making Passover matzo.
Streit’s bakes everyday matzo, which is crispier, as well, with its machines and ovens operating 12 hours a day, six days a week (and closed on the Saturday sabbath).
Those varieties include egg matzo, onion-flavored, whole wheat, organic and gluten-free — although in the old days, Streit’s trucks proudly proclaimed “gluten” on their sides.
So how is Streit’s matzo different from all other matzo?
“The way we layer the dough — six to eight times on each side,” Gross says, “so it becomes less dense with more crisp and snap.”
Some suggest that the matzo’s magic ingredient is NYC’s water — something that might be lost when the factory moves across the Hudson.
Gross shrugs, attributing the superior taste to a high flour-to-water ratio. “People say, ‘Matzo is matzo. Not true — not even close. I still think our worst matzo is better than the competition’s best.”
With the impending sale of the New York property to a real estate developer, Streit’s (rhymes with “rites”) is relocating to its already existing plant in East Rutherford. When the Lower East Side factory doors close on 90 years of tradition, the stories will remain.
Some will be told in “Streit’s: Matzo and the American Dream,” a documentary that premieres at JCC Manhattan Sunday. Other memories will linger with its longtime customers.
Sylvia Hiat, a matriarch of the wealthy NYC Tisch family, strode into the retail store next to the factory the other day, to stock up on kosher-for-Passover fare.
“I’m 86, and I’ve been coming down here for 76 years,” she says. “I buy enough to throw out.”
Meanwhile, the Streit’s staff, who’ve been offered work in Jersey, is sad about the closure.
“It’s heartbreaking — this is it,” says Anthony Zapata, whose official job title for the past 33 years has been, according to him, “a little bit of this, a little bit of that.”
He says he put his two kids through college thanks to a job he secured as an 18-year-old.
“I was walking by and asked for a job,” he says. “I’d never tasted matzo before, or knew it was for Passover, but Jack Streit hired me and I started that day.”
Many workers have not yet decided if they will move as well.
Michael Abramov, 62, has worked the “sheeter” machine for 25 years, since moving to the US from the USSR. “I light the fire every day at 5 a.m.,” he says, proudly. “It’s very important. I spend more time here than with my family.”
But while the factory hands may change, the family’s still in charge.
“We’re five generations — and no murders,” jokes Aron Yagoda, Gross’ cousin who’s also in the business.
“The best compliment I got was when I sent a non-Jewish friend his first-ever matzo. He called, really excited, and said, ‘This is amazing — it tastes great with ham!’ ”
For a tour of the Streit’s factory, call 212-475-7000.