Streit’s Matzo and the American Dream by Michael Levine, © 2017 Menemsha Films, 83 minutes; available via Amazon.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – Those of us with Eastern European origins could visit Ellis Island where immigrants were processed, then go to New York’s Lower East Side to tour the Tenement Museum, which recreates the kind of conditions in which our ancestors lived. Next, we could go to Ratner’s Deli, to enjoy the same foods that they ate, and stop at Streit’s Matzo to see a factory that had been producing the ceremonial Jewish food for five generations.
Ellis Island and the Tenement Museum remain as museums, but both Ratner’s and Streit’s Matzo both have been closed. For one, the Lower East Side no longer is the neighborhood it once was. Once it was the incubator for American assimilation, the first stop for immigrants anxious to paint their lives in red, white, and blue. Today, it is being gentrified, a hub for condos with river and harbor views, and a place with trendy restaurants and bars. For a restaurant like Ratner’s, the change in the neighborhood meant that tastes also changed. Ethnic customers had to commute to eat; they no longer lived down the block or around the corner.
For Streit’s Matzo, which had a factory that sold its products across the country, the problems were not only diminishing sales from its on-site retail store. The issue was how to compete with Israeli and other competitors in an age of modernization. The five-story Streit’s factory stretched over four tenement buildings with ovens for baking on the first and third floors, and with boxing machinery on the second floor. The floors of the adjoining tenement buildings were sometimes at different heights, so ramps were required. The factory was compared by members of the Streit family to a gargantuan game of Chutes and Ladders. Streit’s was a company that shipped most of its product elsewhere, yet it had no loading dock. Trucks had to park in the street, blocking other traffic. The matzo-making machinery dated from 1925 produced the equivalent of 1,000 pounds of matzo per hour. More modern machinery could produce two or three times that amount in an hour, but the problem was that Streit’s space on the Lower East Side was not long enough, high enough, or wide enough to accommodate more modern machinery.
Clearly there were imperatives for moving the factory. Streit’s however held on until 2015, because there also were imperatives for staying. Just as the business had been owned by five generations of the Streit family—the company’s owners are all cousins with different surnames—so too could it be said that generations of the same families were employed by the Streits. If the factory moved, how many of these employees would be able to move with the factory? What assurances would there be that the quality of the matzo in a new location, with new machinery, would be as good as that which Streit’s proclaimed was the very best in the industry? And what about tradition? The Lower East Side was the birthplace of Streit’s Matzo, as well as the American starting point for so many Jewish families. Wouldn’t abandoning the Lower East Side be the equivalent of forsaking American Jewish history?
The family struggled with the issues for many years before finally deciding it had to move from its quaint factory in New York City to a completely modernized one on Route 303 in Orangeburg, New York, which is located in Rockland County only 11 miles from the Orthodox Jewish hamlet of Monsey, New York. It offered jobs to those employees who wished to move or commute to the new site. Some accepted, others couldn’t. One loyal worker of Italian heritage wished the company well, but said he couldn’t bring himself to leave New York City, the place of his roots. An investment company purchased the Lower East Side site, announcing plans to tear it down and to build more condominiums.
In addition to documenting the plight of a legacy business, the movie traces the experience of American immigrants, shows how a neighborhood changes, and also guides us through the steps that flour and water go through to become kosher matzo. Although the Streit family descendants don’t wear kippot, there are plenty of mashgiachs (kosher supervisors) on the premises throughout the production process to make certain all is done in accordance with halacha. That won’t change in Orangeburg.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com