Loaves of Love: Making Challah Offers Special Blessing

HAMPTON COVE, AL — Making challah, the traditional braided bread that many Jews eat as they welcome the Sabbath each week, is a duty that requires digging in with both hands.

Chanie Berkowitz, the wife of Orthodox Rabbi Laibel Berkowitz, encourages Ann Lois Ballon, the wife of retired Rabbi Jeffrey Ballon, to forget the spoon and just begin squeezing the yeasty mass with both hands.

“It gets messy,” Chanie said.

The women reach into the bowl together as Chanie explains how the bread is put together. It’s not a difficult process, Chanie promises, but one that requires attention to the details of the recipe for the best results.

Is there a spiritual lesson in that?

“Always,” Ann Lois Ballon said, laughing.

Rabbi Berkowitz, who is holding the couple’s cherubic 6-month-old daughter, Muka, joins her laughter. A rabbi, he promises, can see a spiritual lesson in most anything.

Chabad Alabama

The Berkowitzes have moved to Huntsville under the sponsorship of Chabad Alabama to offer spiritual lessons and to reach out to Jews who have slipped away from observing the recipe given in Torah, the Hebrew Scriptures.

Rabbi Berkowitz knows that as he walks the streets of Huntsville with his traditional full beard and his head covered with a yarmulke or hat, he runs the risk of looking like the Jew many Christians only know from the “bad guy” characters of the Christian New Testament. While his main energies are directed at supporting and enriching the Jewish community in Huntsville, Berkowitz hopes people of all faiths will get to know him and see that being an Orthodox Jew does not mean he’s an unpleasant or condescending person.

“The first reaction I often get is that people see a Jew traditionally dressed, with a beard, and they think, ‘Oh, he could be very judgmental,’ ” Berkowitz said. “’He’s going to judge us, throw the book at us, say, ‘Look at me: I am being so observant and you’re not.’ ”

But what he and Chanie, and the 4,000 or so other Chabad emissary couples around the world want to do, he said, is not to judge, but to remind all Jews of the beauty, the blessing, of following the holy law’s directions so that the divine is braided into everyday life, just as the challah is formed of braided dough.

With the coming of Rosh Hoshanah and Yom Kippur in the next weeks, Chanie Berkowitz will offer a challah baking demonstration for Jewish women, showing how the regular weekly recipe is augmented with raisins and cinnamon and then braided into a circle to signify the sweetness of the coming circle of the year.

Such practical demonstrations of Jewish practices lie at the heart of Chabad’s teachings.

Chabad, from the Hebrew words for “wisdom,” “comprehension” and “knowledge,” is the service and education arm of Hasidic Judaism, an Orthodox movement that began in Lubavitch, Russia, during the early 1800s to stress the mystical joys of observant Jewish life.

After World War II, from their headquarters in Brooklyn, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, who died in 1950, and his son-in-law and successor, Rabbi Menacham Mendel Schneersohn, who died in 1994 at 92, energized young Jews to reach out to Jews whose religion had been lost to them through persecution, hopelessness or modern assimilation.

Chanie Berkowitz grew up in Birmingham, where her father, Rabbi Yossi Posner, is head of Chabad of Alabama. Rabbi Berkowitz, 25, grew up in Detroit. He is the eighth of nine children, and three of his five brothers are also rabbis. He went to school in Israel and Brooklyn, and has worked in Moscow. Chanie met Laibel through a cousin when she was in school in Brooklyn. Their wedding in Birmingham in 2008 was, they believe, the first Hasidic wedding in the state of Alabama.

The Berkowitzes’ work as pioneers, Rabbi Posner said from his office in Birmingham, takes courage and optimism, as well as friendly, outgoing personalities. They have moved to start Chabad of North Alabama here, the first center outside of Birmingham, because the center in Birmingham was getting calls from Jews in this area inviting Posner and others to come to provide programs, service or talks to the local Jewish community.

Posner led a shofar-making class for children at Etz Chayim, Huntsville’s Conservative Jewish congregation, this time last year. The shofar is traditionally blown at Rosh Hashanah, the start of the new year.

“These young people are courageous,” Posner said. “I can remember my beginning here in Birmingham (in the early ’80s).”

Chabad in Birmingham now has built a center and runs a preschool. But Posner still remembers the early years of his work there.

“It was lonely, tough and difficult,” Posner said. “I remember just hoping I would be able to talk to just one person, just to form a friendship. I didn’t really know if I could become an integral member of this community.”

Huntsville Jews

That problem shouldn’t exist in Huntsville, said Bill Goldberg, a leader of Etz Chayim.

“We have a lot in common with the Chabad movement, and we know that Rabbi Berkowitz is already adding variety to the available Jewish classes for adults and children in Huntsville,” Goldberg wrote by e-mail. “We welcome their presence and hope that we are all successful in attracting even more Jews to the Huntsville area and in getting them all involved in Jewish programs.”

The BRAC shifts have brought more people of every faith to the Huntsville area, and inquiries at both Jewish congregations in Huntsville, Etz Chayim, whose rabbi visits from Atlanta, and at Temple B’nai Sholom, which has a resident rabbi, have increased in the last few years. It’s a good time to have options for local Jews, Berkowitz said.

“I’m here to show the beauty that Torah has to offer and to be a proud Jew – and encourage others to be proud of the observances of Judaism,” Berkowitz said.

While he’s happy to talk with anyone and answer questions, he is not here to proselytize among Christians, he stressed.

The mitzvot, the commandments, are a connection, he said, an action that helps a person connect with God.

Like the making of challah for Sabbath, Chanie Berkowitz said. She and Ann Lois Ballon have dumped out the risen dough, pinched off a bit to say a prayer over and to offer to God as a burnt offering by baking it in a hot oven.

They then braided ropes of dough into small loaves. After they have risen one more time and been baked, Rabbi Berkowitz will take some of the loaves to Jews in the area just in time for their use with the lighting of the Sabbath candles at sundown on Friday.

“There are special mitzvot that just apply to women,” Chanie said. “It’s not like a guy can’t make challah, but this is a special thing for a woman. It brings a special blessing.”

“It’s a special moment between a woman and God,” Chanie said, her hands swiftly shaping another loaf and sliding it into a pan. “And it’s yummy for Shabbat.”