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Adir Michaeli, maestro of the babka, bakes his way into the heart of Manhattan
(New York Jewish Week) — In a city where love of babka borders on a religion, Adir Michaeli, founder of Michaeli Bakery, is the (you’ll pardon the expression) high priest of the confection.
You may not know his name, but if you love good babka, you probably know his product. Michaeli, 39, was once the pastry department manager and head pastry chef of Lechamim Bakery in Tel Aviv; there, Michaeli told the New York Jewish Week, he spent two years perfecting the babka recipe. When Lechamim founder Uri Scheft wanted to expand to the United States, he tapped Michaeli to help open Lechamim’s American cousin, Breads Bakery, in New York. Since opening in 2013, Breads has since become the gold standard for babka in New York.
After three years with Breads — which has since expanded to five locations in the city — Michaeli left the company to start his own business, which he said was a dream of his. Now, after a fitful start due to COVID, Michaeli Bakery has developed its own devoted following at two locations in Manhattan.
“People love these pastries,” said Michaeli, referring to New Yorkers’ embrace of the babka, rugelach and bourekas for which Breads, and now Michaeli, has become known.
Of course, it’s not like New Yorkers were suffering from a lack of babka prior to either bakery’s arrival. Lots of bakeries, notably Green’s Bakery of Brooklyn, had been making and selling the gooey, yeasted cake for decades. Local New York comedian Jerry Seinfeld even devoted an episode of his eponymous show to the sweet treat back in 1994.
But Breads brought a babka to New York unlike anything that New Yorkers had ever tasted before. It was made with a laminated dough, similar to croissants, and it was at once light, fluffy and rich, layered with butter, stuffed with Nutella and chocolate chunks, and glazed with a simple syrup. A couple of months after Breads opened on East 16th St. near Union Square in 2013, New York magazine food writers Robin Raisfeld and Rob Patronite anointed Breads’ babka as the best in the city.
“The business went boom!” Michaeli told the New York Jewish Week. Almost overnight, Breads went from a virtually unknown purveyor of Israeli pastries to an essential stop on the tourist food trail.
“Everyone starts to come and take pictures with the babka,” said Michaeli. During their first Rosh Hashanah, not long after the New York magazine article appeared, Michaeli said the bakery sold 3,000 loaves of babka in a single day.
(Co-founder Scheft left Breads in 2021 and now runs Bakey, a Boston bakery. As for Breads’ current ownership, a spokesperson said that Michaeli “had nothing to do with the creation of Breads Bakery’s Babka.”)
After leaving Breads, Michaeli considered opening up a bakery in Tel Aviv and briefly returned there, but, assessing the competition, he soon realized that his future was in New York.
“There was only one Israeli bakery in New York — more [of them] should come,” he said.
Living on the Upper West Side while working on his business plan and meeting with potential investors, Michaeli did some baking for Anat Sror, an Israeli-born caterer and owner of Cafe Petisco, a now-closed restaurant on the Lower East Side.
Sror knew that Michaeli wanted to start his own bakery, and though she had never invested in anybody before, she decided to back Michaeli. “He’s very talented, very passionate, and he knew exactly what he wanted to do,” said Sror. “He had a great business plan. Plus, we had worked together so I knew exactly what he is capable of. I felt it was a good risk to take.”
Sror helped Michaeli find a storefront not too far from Cafe Petisco. They both agreed it was not an ideal location, but it was within their budget. “We trusted that once people try his stuff and get to know the bakery, things will be easier,” Sror said.
Michaeli Bakery opened on Division St. on the Lower East Side in May 2019. Conceived as an “Israeli patisserie,” it sold pastries, cookies, cakes, cream cakes, cheesecakes, sandwiches and, on Fridays, challah.
Less than a year later, however, just as the bakery was developing a name for itself, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the city to its knees. As New Yorkers stayed home or left the city altogether, Sror shut her restaurant and catering concern. Meanwhile, Michaeli streamlined his bakery’s offerings, focusing on babka, rugelach and bourekas, dropping the sandwiches and cakes on his original menu.
During the long months of the pandemic, Michaeli said he worked round the clock, keeping the business open seven days a week and working as the establishment’s baker, barista and manager. On the bright side? “It gave me the flexibility to build the business over time,” he said.
His efforts paid off: Less than three years later, in March 2022, Michaeli and Sror opened a second location on East 90th St. and First Ave. “The decision to open on the Upper East Side was because customers kept saying it was too far to come to the Lower East Side,” said Sror.
Sensing “the vibe” uptown, according to Michaeli, he decided to make the bakery kosher. “My integrity is that if I’m kosher, I’m kosher,” he said, referring to his decision to have kosher supervision for both bakeries, and to close them on Saturdays and early on Fridays. “Uptown Sunday is super busy, we need the reset of Saturday. “
“My vision is that I do the best that I can,” he added. “Everyone on the team is the same. Every day should be 100%. There is no 99%. This is the DNA of the place.”
One loyal customer, art consultant Andrea Meislin, raves about the “chocolate-y, gooey and decadent” babka at Michaeli, what Meislin describes as “babka to die for.” In addition to the chocolate babka, Michaeli makes a vegan chocolate babka, cheese and cherry babka and halvah babka. His Galil bourekas, made with goat cheese, onion and za’atar, are very popular, too.
These days, the biggest challenge Michaeli faces, he said, is dealing with the enormous demand the holidays bring. “For Hanukkah, I sent the manager out to the line on the street, to say that we are sorry. We can’t catch up with demand,” said Michaeli. “We told customers [on line] to go away. It was horrible. It is a problem I am trying to solve.”
Moving forward, Sror is optimistic that the bakery will expand: “It will either be another location, perhaps on the Upper West Side, or we are thinking about making a bigger location to be able to produce a bit more,” she said. Sror hopes Michaeli will be able to expand his menu, perhaps by adding his classic, light Israeli cheesecakes, what Michaeli calls “Grandma Cheesecake.”
When asked what differentiates Michaeli’s baked goods from Breads’ or other bakeries’, the baker refused to compare, stating that he just aims to do the best he can, all the time. “If someone says this is better than this or that, I really don’t care,” says Michaeli. “There is no competition. This is what we do.”
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At Chabad Hanukkah party in California, hours after Bondi Beach massacre, joy defied grief’s shadow
PACIFIC PALISADES, CALIFORNIA – A familiar sight at public gatherings, especially Jewish ones — young men in Hasidic garb wrapping black leather tefillin straps around the arms of strangers — felt different here Sunday evening as Rabbi Shimon Goldberg helped Rick Entin fulfill the commandment at a Hanukkah block party in the Palisades. The mitzvahs of tefillin and lighting candles had become acts of defiance and joy as the gathering grieved the 15 people killed at a Chabad Hanukkah event in Sydney.
The attack cut deeply in the close-knit Chabad community, whose brand — and vulnerability — lies in the proud public practicing of Jewish rituals. Some of them were personally connected to Rabbi Eli Schlanger, the Chabad emissary who had organized the Sydney event, and died in the attack.
Yet they were celebrating Hanukkah on Sunday with a group that knew something about resilience: 11 months earlier, the Palisades fire tore through this area, destroying thousands of homes, including Entin’s just up the street. For many, the Hanukkah event was the first time they had been in Jewish community in the Palisades since the inferno. This was the occasion the Palisades Chabad — whose campus was damaged in the fire — had planned to commemorate, and from which its leaders would not be deterred.
“Whoever was strategizing this terrorist attack, they want the Jews not just in Sydney, but even in Los Angeles to fear showing up for a Hanukkah event,” said Goldberg, head of a local Chabad-affiliated nonprofit, as he placed a tefillin box atop Entin’s forehead. “This we won’t allow them to do.”
The 38th annual Palisades candlelighting was always going to be bittersweet; many there remained displaced by the fire, and some remain unsure whether they will rebuild. Jewish leaders who planned the event said they did not need to change the program due to the terrorist attack — it was already about celebration in the face of loss.
So, too, is Hanukkah, a holiday that tells of a miraculous jug of oil found amid great ruin. And both Chabad and Kehillat Israel, a Reconstructionist synagogue in the Pacific Palisades that co-sponsored the event, had, miraculously, found the spark on an otherwise gloomy day.
Overlooking the street that had been blocked off for the event were vacant lots where homes had stood a year earlier. But melancholy was hard to come by as one walked through the teeming masses at the event. Kids sat for glitter tattoos and balloon animals; lines snaked for latkes and jelly donuts and hot chocolate, all free. Old friends exchanging long-overdue hugs could be heard saying I’m so sorry about your house. On stage before the candlelighting, a gaggle of youngsters delivered a spirited rendition of “I’m a little latke.”
“It’s almost like the Maccabees,” said Chayim Frenkel, Kehillat Israel’s longtime cantor. “They went into the Temple, cleaned it up, found the menorah, found the oil. And surrounded by the rubble of what the Greeks did, we brought light and hope.”
The Palisades Chabad members in attendance were putting on a doubly brave face: The fire had damaged part of the school on the campus of Chabad of Pacific Palisades, according to Rabbi Zushe Cunin, its director. Classes have still not returned to the building.
“It’s been hard,” Cunin said. “So much trauma, a lot of people have not resolved things, their house, their insurance, their struggles. But Hanukkah is a time to rise above that. Tonight is about strengthening our resolve.”
Cunin’s son, Mordechai, was among the group channeling that resolve through tefillin. The mitzvah — which is required only of Jewish men — was one the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the last Lubavitcher Rebbe, had implored his followers to promote in order to hasten the arrival of the Messiah. Mordechai and his yeshiva buddies reported having wrapped at least 10 men that day, including three first-time wearers.
It was not lost on the tefillin crew that Schlanger — whose nephew is Mordechai’s classmate — died doing what they were doing now — helping Jewish people from all walks of life connect to Judaism. But to Goldberg, that was only reason to lean in.
“When someone leaves this physical world, their soul is still there, but they can’t do mitzvos,” Goldberg said. “When we think of Rabbi Eli, we are his hands and feet. He can’t put on tefillin today — but we can put on tefillin for him.”
The post At Chabad Hanukkah party in California, hours after Bondi Beach massacre, joy defied grief’s shadow appeared first on The Forward.
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In the fight against K-12 antisemitism, we are grateful for allies – but are not afraid to call out antisemitism when we see it
Recent articles in the Forward spotlighted important conversations around combating K-12 antisemitism that took place at the Jewish Federations of North America’s General Assembly, but missed critical distinctions about our commitment to working with partners throughout the K-12 space and our stance on teachers’ unions. In particular, they ignored the distinction between the two largest teachers’ unions in the US – the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
Federations throughout North America work closely with educators and educational leadership. We are grateful to the many educators committed to doing right by their students and by the Jewish community, and to our many allies in the education space – including the AFT, led by Randi Weingarten, and its New York affiliate, the UFT, which recently partnered with the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York on a curriculum and training about Jewish Americans.
We are committed to ensuring teachers have access to the content and knowledge they need to accurately educate about Jewish communities, Israel and antisemitism and to provide safe learning environments for Jewish students. Increasingly, however, we also see instances of organizations and individuals encouraging teachers to use materials and trainings that seek to disconnect educators from those positive resources, or worse, to provide resources that harm Jewish students and foster classroom antisemitism.
Some union spaces have become toxic even for Jewish teachers. The recent debate at the NEA’s Representative Assembly about boycotting the ADL, as well as a union resource guide linking to a third-party source erasing Israel off the map and sympathizing with the Holocaust, were shocking. We are grateful that NEA leadership vetoed the boycott resolution and apologized for the link, but we are reminded of the need for vigilance and organizing so that this type of resource is not recommended – even inadvertently – to educators. We stand ready to work with the NEA to help ensure that biased and ultimately harmful teaching materials are legitimized.
Both nationally and at the local level, Federations are proud of the educational partnerships that make our schools better and stronger. We are grateful every day to the educators who teach our children and seek out accurate information and ways to teach critical thinking that enable the foundation of our future democracy – and our safety within it. We are eager for additional partners and partnerships. But at the same time, we will not stand by when antisemitism is enabled in the classroom.
Our commitment is to promote policies and actions that enable Jewish children and teachers to be safe in school and take pride in their identity, and to ensure that Jewish identity, culture and resilience are celebrated and accurately taught.
The post In the fight against K-12 antisemitism, we are grateful for allies – but are not afraid to call out antisemitism when we see it appeared first on The Forward.
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Her daughter left the Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration just before the shooting, then asked, ‘Mommy, why do they hate us so much?’
The daughter of an American expatriate living about two miles from the mass killing at a Hanukkah celebration in suburban Sydney, Australia, escaped the carnage by coming home to change clothes, her mother said.
“She’d been there earlier that afternoon, on the bridge where they were shooting. She came home, changed her clothes, and was getting ready to go again,” said Michelle Stein-Evers, a former Los Angeles resident and a co-founder of the Alliance of Black Jews in 1995.
“She and her friends were on their way back to Bondi to go to the party and have something to eat, and they were stopped by the police,” Stein-Evers said. “She found out why, and she started calling everyone to let us know. Her best friend’s cousin was killed. Another best friend’s cousin was shot in the leg.”
Her daughter, who is 22, had previously locked down her Facebook account out of privacy concerns and requested that her name not be used. As the massacre unfolded Sunday, she turned to social media to search for information.
“‘Oh my God, there’s bodies everywhere,’” Stein-Evers said her daughter told her.
She also asked where her father was, amid rumors — later proven untrue — that the neighborhood where he had gone to play tennis was also affected.
Stein-Evers said the events were unfolding within minutes of their home, where she was alone after her daughter headed back toward the beach.
“It was scary. It was nothing but sirens — sirens and sirens — and helicopters,” she said.
Stein-Evers said she knew the first victim publicly identified among the dead, Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who helped organize the celebration.
“He was, by consensus, one of the nicest guys in the Jewish community in Sydney,” she said.
Antisemitic incidents have been rising in Sydney and across Australia since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Stein-Evers said, adding that her daughter stopped attending the prestigious University of Sydney because of campus protests.
“She was constantly being heckled, asked, ‘Where are you from? Are you Jewish? Are you an Arab? Why aren’t you with us?’” Stein-Evers said. Her daughter would not respond to the questions and eventually enrolled in distance learning through a college in Melbourne.
Stein-Evers, who has lived in the Middle East — including in Muslim-majority countries — as well as Europe and the United States, said she now has concerns about her own safety.
“I was never scared to be a Jew in America. I was never scared in Germany,” she said — a fear she said is now shared by her daughter.
“When she came home last night, she was in tears,” Stein-Evers said. “‘Mommy, why do they hate us so much?’”
The post Her daughter left the Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration just before the shooting, then asked, ‘Mommy, why do they hate us so much?’ appeared first on The Forward.