Visit to the world's largest handmade matzo factory

One of the many pleasures for me of being in Israel, is the introduction to new family members. I knew I had relatives in Kfar Chabad whom I had never met, so  my cousin, Bruriah suggested we pay them a visit, I was very eager. Not only was this a place of which I'd never been, but to my mind it promised to be somewhat exotic.

Kfar means village, and Chabad is a Hasidic movement in Orthodox Judaism, founded in the late 18th century in Lubavitch, Russia. Members of this movement, mostly from the Soviet Union who were survivors of World War II and Stalinist oppression, founded the settlement in Israel in 1949. Since I come from a largely secular and very urban family,  the visit promised to be somewhat out of the ordinary.

Located 8 km. southeast of Tel Aviv, Kfar Chabad, as one might expect, is rustic. We drove in along quiet country roads, with orange and lemon trees everywhere, chickens roaming freely, and little boys with kippahs on their heads and sidelocks racing around on bicycles . There were many modest houses a goodly distance from each other, no satellite dishes on the roofs, no horns honking, no traffic jams. It was a quiet country atmosphere.

We were welcomed by Saraleh, my third cousin, and the 51 year old matriarch of the Kfar Chabad family, and Gittel, the only daughter of her 6 children. Gittel is 17, in teachers' college and of marriagable age, which means that her parents are actively trying to find her a match. Gittel served us tea and cookies she had baked herself. We sat in the dining room where the only adornment on the walls was a portrait of the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the charismatic Rebbe (leader) of the Chabad movement, who was greatly responsible for expanding Chabad's activities worldwide as a vehicle of Jewish outreach. Many of his followers view him to be the Jewish Messiah.
In the dining room were also floor to ceiling bookshelves, filled only with religious books on biblical and Talmudic subjects.

After tea and cookies Saraleh and Gittel asked us if we would like a tour of the village, including what they said was the world's largest handmade matzo factory. I thought this was an opportunity not to be missed, even though I didn't know what was meant by handmade matzo. Never embarrassed to show my ignorance in the quest for knowledge,  I asked Saraleh. "These are the special Shmura matzos," she answered. I vaguely knew what they were because we had them at our Passover Seder every year. They were specially obtained matzos, that didn't look like the square, uniformly produced machine made matzos; rather these were round and artisanal looking. But I didn't really know what made them special. Saraleh explained that ordinary matzo is made without any yeast or fermentation, but Shmura matzo quite literally means guarded matzo, which means that extra care has been taken to ensure that no fermentation whatsoever has taken place. So the wheat is reaped before the sheaves have completely dried out, because if the sheaves are dry and come into contact with rain, they can become moldy and fermented. The wheat is then guarded until it is ground. Most people make a point of eating a little Shmura matzo at the Seder.

Enriched by this knowledge, we approached a most unremarkable low-slung building. Once inside we walked down a long corridor, following our noses to the smell of fresh baking. And then we came upon large glass windows through which we could see the matzo factory. So much activity! And all of it by bearded men in identical blue T-shirts. To one side, and obviously the first step in the process, was a man weighing water, and another flour, the only 2 ingredients of Shmura matzo. (or any matzo). Other men mixed and kneaded the mixture by hand, in large bowls. In the centre of the room, about 20 men were standing along either side of a long table, rolling dough into logs. One man was cutting the logs into rounds, while others were rolling the rounds into  round flat shapes, not unlike pizza.

I was impressed at the speed and efficiency with which this production was taking place, but I was also somewhat surprised to see men doing this work, especially in a traditional society where baking is generally the domain of women, as Gittel had shown minutes before with the cookies she had baked. Gittel explained that the men make the matzo because it involves a lot of physical strength.

Once the dough was rolled into rounds, the rounds were hung over wooden poles. The poles were then carried over to a round brick oven, much resembling a pizza oven, in which a fire roared, where they were baked until done - just a few seconds.

Again in the interest of maintaining purity by avoiding fermentation, all of the equipment is scrubbed down and the rolling pins sanded, so that no bits from the old batch adhere to the news one.

The whole process from start to finish cannot take more than 18 minutes. Impressively the factory produces a ton of matzo a day, and it's shipped all over the world.  In order to keep up with demand, with Passover approaching, the factory operates 24 hours a day. (except on Shabbat, or course.)

When I said goodbye to my Chabad cousins, they gave me a box of the Shmura matzo, which I most gratefully accepted. When I celebrate the Passover Seder this year with my secular cousins in Tel Aviv, in the centre of the table will be the Shmura matzo, not only to remind us of our exodus from Egypt, but also to honour the dedication and devotion of the men who baked them.

In Israel digging up the past doesn't mean going over past wrongs for the purpose of starting an argument; it means digging up the soil to literally unearth clues to past history. Israel is passionate about archaeology. In a country where history, like cleanliness, is not only next to godliness but very intertwined with it, the approach to it is something akin to sanctity. So when I found out about an archaeological dig at Ein Gedi in January, I decided to join.

Ein Gedi is in the Negev, on the western shore of the Dead Sea. It was actually a thriving city in Biblical times and later supplied persimmons for the Romans. (They cosidered it a great delicacy.)It was destroyed by Justinian who burnt it to the ground in the 6th century AD.The Mameluks settled there briefly in the 12th century, and was then abandoned. An archaeological excavation has been going on there for the past 17 years, initially under the auspices of the Hebrew University. A sixth century A.D. Byzantine synagogue with a beautiful mosaic floor had already been unearthed, and now we were going to continue working on excavating what was thought to be the home of a wealthy man named Halfi, based on clues provided in the synagogue, of which he had presumably been a patron.

The Ein Gedi dig is a rather minor one and no longer has official Hebrew University sponsorship. However, archaeologist, Dr. Gidon Hadas perseveres, and relies on volunteers who come in the month of January, pay their own room and board for the privilege of spending 7 hours a day digging in the sand. Remarkably there were about 15 people, myself included, willing to do so.

Our accommodations were in the Ein Gedi youth hostel, about a 15 minute walk from the site. There were 4 of us in a room as comfortable as it could be with 4 women sharing facilities. Two were from Switzerland, one from Australia, and myself from Canada. Our work day began at 7am, which meant waking up at 6 a.m. when it was still dark and the desert air chilly. Wordlessly and somewhat dazed, (at least I was!) the 4 of us managed to coordinate our respective morning rituals very smoothly, and off we trudged to the site.

When we arrived, the sun was just beginning to rise over the Dead Sea, which was about 200 yards in front of us. Behind us were the pinky orange mountains, so characteristic of the Negev desert, and date and mango groves. (Ein Gedi is an oasis.) The other volunteers were already there. As I was soon to discover, many of them were seasoned veterans of the dig, having begun their participation 17 years earlier when it first began, and to them taking part in it had become something of a sacred ritual. They were from England, Germany and Switzerland, and ranged in age from 21 to 83, men and women, most of whom were not Jewish.

Gidon, the amiable coordinator of the dig, was there to greet us. Israel is a very informal country, and although Gidon is a PhD and an elder statesman in the world of archaeology, he was always addressed by his first name, even by a group of 18 year olds who were to join us later.

An old wooden trailer served as a storage shed in which all the tools we would need were kept. Not knowing what to choose, I was given a short handled pick axe, a pair of work gloves, a large metal dustpan, a brush and a tool that had no name but which looked like a small sickle with a serrated edge, and off we went to the site.

For each of us Gidon drew rectangles in the sand of about 4 feet by 2 feet and instructed us to dig down but no more than 4 inches and to dump the sand into the many plastic buckets that were provided. For me this was not so simple. The objective was to meet up with the person working on the rectangle "next door", and in this way remove what amounted to a layer. While most people managed to arrange themselves on a seat made from a bucket filled with sand and turned upside down, or on their knees on a rubber gardening mat, neither of these positions was comfortable for me. I preferred the somewhat ungraceful position of bending over from a standing position, while trying to remember to bend my knees so I wouldn't put too much stress on my back.

With the pick I loosened sand, or pried loose rocks. Rocks that wouldn't come loose had to be dislodged by scraping the sand around them with the serrated sickle. The sand, it should be mentioned, was not soft and easy to work with as on a beach or sandbox. Through the centuries it had become impacted so that it was rock hard. Sand went into one bucket, rocks in another. And the buckets of course had to be emptied: rocks in a rock pile that was accumulating behind the dig site, and sand in a flat bed attached to a tractor which Gidon would drive to a growing hill nearby and dump. There were no elves who appeared to dump the rock and sand buckets which became filled remarkably quickly, so the younger, stronger volunteers would do it. As a grandmother I fell into the blond area (I didn't want to say "gray") of whenever I felt like it, which was less often as the day wore on.

There was also a third category of bucket, called the "treasure bucket." Into this went anything that might be of value: pottery shards and glass fragments, but only big pieces as the small ones were considered useless, bones, teeth, coins, and anything else the earth might yield.

After an hour of filling buckets, boredom and hunger set in. Another hour to breakfast. Convincing myself that hunger melts fat, I persevered.

At precisely 9 am, came the call for breakfast which was served at the site, on a long picnic table. Breakfast consisted of bread, hard boiled eggs, olives, processed cheese, yogurt, chopped cucumber and tomato salad, dates, and tiny cubes of halvah in limited supply. I was too hungry to complain, but not hungry enough to be appreciative. The breakfast menu was never to vary. After half an hour, we were ordered back to work.

By now it was 9:30 and I knew that quitting time was 2pm. We weren't even at the half way mark. This was not what I thought it was going to be. Actually if I had given it some serious thought, I probably wouldn't have come. There's a reason it's called a dig- because that's what you do. Relentlessly! I listened to the other volunteers, happily chatting and laughing to each other, and I was jealous. Why were they having a good time and I wasn't? And they came back, year after year, with great anticipation. What wasn't I getting here?

I laboured on, filling bucket after bucket with sand and rocks and then dumping them, occasionally finding a shard large enough to go into the treasure bucket. I resolved not to look at my watch. Instead every now and then I would look up from my digging, and look out at the green expanse of the Dead Sea, which was once used as a waterway to transport people and goods. I saw the groves of mangos and dates and knew that they existed in Byzantine times when the Negev was much less of a desert than it is today. The shards that I dug up were part of jugs and dishes that were used in the preparation, storing and serving of food, wine and water. Civilizations had been here, destroyed by fire, wars, and the merciless progress of time. I was trying hard to find my purpose.

At noon a 15 minute fruit break was announced. We were each given an orange and 2 squares of chocolate. An hour and 45 minutes to go. To my delight and surprise 10 minutes of that was shaved off as we stopped a little earlier to put back the tools and clean up the site. Most of the volunteers then headed to the Ein Gedi Kibbutz nearby for lunch, but I was too tired and filthy to care about eating.

I slowly made my way back to the youth hostel, which seemed much farther away than it had at dawn 7 hours earlier. I felt much better after a hot shower, a cup of tea and some fruit. I sat out on the balcony of my shared room, looking out at the Dead Sea, catching up on email, and reading. I was asleep by 9 o'clock. I woke up at one point and heard all 3 of my roommates snoring. I smiled to myself. This symphony was the result of shared labours.

The next day promised to be much like the first, but before long we were joined by a group of about 12 young Israelis, boys and girls, who were part of a program called Shnat Sherut, which means Year of Service. This is a voluntary service between the completion of high school and entering the army, where they do things such as serve as leaders all over the country in programs for youth at risk, work on kibbutzim, help out on digs, etc.

These kids had energy! They swung big pick axes and crushed boulders to smitherines. They emptied our buckets! They sang while they worked. They laughed and joked with each other with obvious affection and camaraderie. It was clear that they loved what they were doing. And without really understanding why, I found their attitude infectious.

The days passed. We uncovered more and more of the inner and outer walls of Halfi's house. The site looked very different now than it had 2 weeks earlier. We found many coins, a black and white glass bracelet, and a couple of jugs intact and perfectly preserved. I found a partial jawbone with 6 teeth that Gidon said likely had belonged to an ibex, the goat that is native to the region.

And then came my last day. Gidon presented me with a certificate that I had successfully completed my time on the dig. I even bought the Tshirt. And I lost 10 pounds!

Would I do it again? Maybe yes maybe no. But for me whether or not I come back is not what the dig was about. Participating in it made me feel that I really am a part of a continuum of a people who lived here and continue to do so, that I was privileged to touch bits of their lives- literally - and that my smallness of being just one liitle human soul is made larger and more meaningful.

The desert and the deep blue sea- for real

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