Baking Matzah Can Be Hazardous to Your Health!

I had a dilemma this afternoon, as I had to choose between two competing priorities. I was thinking about joining Alyson, who was driving around the city, checking out locations for home-visits. You see, when the Pesach Project is here next week, participants will go visit elderly Chesed clients in their homes. Of course, the hosts need to be somewhat healthy, articulate, interested in having guests and, most importantly, their homes have to be able to hold a group of seven people. So, an unfortunate necessity is that the potential hosts need to be screened, and Alyson was in charge of checking out their cribs. It's always interesting to visit these people, and I really wanted to go, but I figured I spend enough time with Alyson (and she'll tell me all the stories anyway!).

Instead, I opted for a different experience with the elderly. All this week and next, YESOD will be hosting a matzah-baking factory. This factory isn't anything fancy: a few tables where people can roll the dough into thin circles, and two large hot-plates where the matzah bakes before your very eyes. The big children's event is this Sunday, but during the regular workdays, the clientele of the matzah-baking factory is the Chesed clients.

I volunteered to help in the matzah factory this afternoon, and I was in for a fun experience! Over the course of an hour, about 30 elderly people (mostly babushkas) came through the factory. Since my Russian isn't that good (and it's basically non-existent when it comes to cooking!) I let my fellow volunteer, a nice student from the Jewish university, explain how to make the matzah. I was content with a supporting role, flipping matzahs on the hotplate and, once finished, handing them to their eager maker. Here is what I witnessed:

• First, either Russian doesn't have an equivalent of "a watched pot never boils," or no-one bothered to tell these people that "a stared-at matzah doesn't bake." In the five minutes it takes to cook one of these matzahs, they must have asked 50 times "Eta Gatov? (Is it ready?)". You would expect them to make small talk or chat amongst themselves, but no--they stood there, just staring at their creations. Literally, there were times I couldn't even get to the oven, because the crowd was so thick it would push me away! I wanted to tell them, "Seriously, people, it's just matzah!" - but then I realized that, after living their whole lives under the Soviets, it's still a novelty here.
  
• Then, an argument erupted over whose matzah belonged to whom. Imagine four-foot-tall babushkas yelling at each other: "Eta mayah!" "Nyet, eta mayah." "Nyet, you have the ugly one." "Nyet, I have the pretty one." "Nyet, that one is yours. This one is mine." "Nyet. Young man, tell her that one's mine." I thought they were going to pull off their rubber gloves and hairnets and start slugging each other! Luckily, one woman stepped in and negotiated a compromise, so I didn't have to call security on the babushkas and shut down the matzah factory for fear of a geriatric riot.
• One woman didn't feel any pain in her hands. She flipped the matzah by herself, ignoring the fact that it was on a 250-degree hotplate. She belongs on that tv show, "Heroes."
  
• One man was flat-out crazy. He was all alone at the very end, just yelling to himself about how he remembers his grandmother teaching him how to bake matzah and repeating the Hamotzi blessing over and over. I think he scared some of the other participants. Anyway, his grandmother taught him well, because the crazy guy made the most beautiful, circular matzahs of any of the participants.

I thought I was just spending an hour volunteering to flip matzahs. I ended up getting a lesson in post-Soviet geriatric sociology!