Streit’s Matzo Factory – the fifth generation family business and neighborhood anchor for nearly a century – is departing the Lower East Side for good this spring. It’s an extremely heartbreaking turn of events, and we’re reeling. The following dispatch was sent to us this morning by filmmaker Michael Levine, who had been shooting at the factory for his upcoming documentary, Streit’s Matzo and the American Dream, with his producer, Michael Green, when the announcement came.
Since 1925, the Streit’s Matzo factory has stood at 148-154 Rivington Street on New York’s Lower East Side. Here, in four, low-slung brick tenement buildings, five generations of the Streit family, and as many generations of factory workers, devoted their lives to the art of mixing flour and water, and sending these two simple ingredients through a seventy-three foot long oven to create sheets of matzo, the unleavened bread central to the Jewish holiday of Passover.
The last family-owned matzo factory in the United States, Streit’s has endured for nearly a century, continuing to produce 40 percent of the nation’s matzo using machinery as old as the business itself, and employing 60 workers, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, native New Yorkers and immigrants from around the world, all of whom found a livelihood and a second family behind these walls.
Yesterday afternoon, in a cramped lunchroom on the factory’s third floor, workers gathered to hear the news from the Streit family that the factory will permanently close its doors on Rivington Street at the conclusion of this year’s Passover baking season. The four tenement buildings that comprise the factory are now under contract to a developer, whose identity and plans for the site have yet to be made public.
The business itself will remain, as it has been, in the hands of the Streit family, who hope to find a new home for the factory and as many of their workers as possible, though no site has been chosen. Alas, perhaps the only certainty at this time is that any new factory, to be sustainable, will have to be built outside of New York City.
For the full story and a behind the scenes look at the streits’ factory click here
