In the wake of closing his family’s 34-year-old bakery, Phil Weinberger urged his former customers, “Remember to support kosher businesses.”
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Sunday morning found Phil Weinberger at his home near the Yale Golf Course in Upper Westville. Until recently, Sunday morning found him — starting at 1 a.m. — baking kosher breads and desserts in Wallingford, then selling them at the Westville Kosher Bakery on Whalley Avenue.
The 57 year-old Weinberger — known on the Internet as “Babkaman” through a mail-order kosher baked-goods business he ran — was talking about babka and challah Sunday morning. Talking about what it took, and what it meant, to bake goods that Jewish families who follow kosher dietary laws depended on. Talking about how his grandfather Nathan ran a kosher bakery on Legion Avenue. Talking about how his parents started the popular New Haven bakery in 1972 that he took over in 1988. And not talking, or trying not to talk, about the decision he and his wife Jill made to close the Westville bakery, their Wallingford shop, and the online business right before Memorial Day.
Weinberger was determined not to talk about the details of why he closed because he wants to look ahead and move on with his life. The bakery closed at a busy and at times tumultuous period in New Haven’s kosher economy. On the one hand, an enviable roster of kosher-supervised food establishments are in business, an impressive number for a small city. On the other hand, that has increased the competition. Also, a changing of the rabbinical guard after a long period of stability at local Orthodox synagogues has led to some painful disputes within the Jewish community over supervision of kosher businesses.
“We closed for business reasons. The business climate was difficult. We should have done this two, three years ago.” That’s all Weinberger was willing to say for publication about what led to the bakery’s closing.
He did want to impress on the Jewish community the need to find ways to support kosher businesses over the long term.
“You open a business to make money. Bottom line,” Weinberger said. “When you open a kosher business, it’s not all about making money. It’s about building community. People can’t forget this. They have to remember. The person who opens a kosher business already is at a disadvantage. It’s going to cost him a lot more money to do the same business,” because of extra costs associated with meeting religious kosher standards.
“When you deal with rabbis,” Weinberger continued, “however they interpret the halakhah [Jewish law], there shouldn’t be levity, but there should be support” on such questions as demanding changes in the way an establishment is run when it has been supervised by a rabbi for many years. “The next time they [customers] think of going into a store, they should remember to support kosher businesses. Rabbis come and go. But we live here.”
The Westville Kosher Bakery’s closing left something of a void in the community, at least in the Amity stretch of Westville where several kosher businesses are located, because it sold “pareve“ desserts and challahs, the egg breads that Jewish families eat at the Friday night Sabbath meal. Pareve foods are cooked in ovens and pans that touch neither dairy nor meat. So religious Jewish families, who don’t mix milk and meat dishes or eat milk and meat together, can use pareve challahs for both meat and dairy Sabbath meals.
“The hardest thing?” Weinberger said. “We went swimming the other day [at a Woodbridge pool club]. There was a family. They have triplets. We did their party when they were first born.
“The wife says to me, ‘My son was crying. He said, “Where am I going to get my cookies?”’
Just then, Weinberger recalled, the boy walked up to his mother. “He sees me and my wife standing there. He starts crying again. That was hard. It felt worse than closing.”
A kosher outlet closer to downtown, Stella’s European Bakery & Caf√©, at 372 Whalley Ave. in the Edgewood/Beaver Hills area, does sell pareve baked goods. It has seen a spike in business since Weinberger closed up shop.
Some other places to buy kosher baked goods or other food in New Haven: Westville Kosher (Glatt) Market (95 Amity Rd.), Edge of the Woods (379 Whalley Ave.), Claire’s Corner Copia (corner of Chapel and College streets), the Amity Stop and Shop, and Kosher Express (Chinese food, 132 Amity Rd.).
Phil Weinberger doesn’t plan to start a new kosher business to add to that list. He said he’s currently “resolving our financial issues” with the bakery. Then, he said, “I’d like to get my business behind me. I’m going to work for someone else. I don’t want food. I don’t want to be [a] kosher [business]. I don’t want rabbis. Nothing against any of them,” he said, but he’d like to move on.