BEIGEL'S BAKERY

"Beigel's In The News"

Baking & Snack Magazine

Dec-2016 - In a world shadowed in so many hues of gray, it’s good to know that some things are simply black and white. Take Beigel’s Bakery, which found its home in Brooklyn in the 1940s and never left. The kosher-parve bakery operates by clearly defined rules and with the strictest of discipline that’s earned the trust of its loyal customers — many who have been “house accounts” for decades.

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Jewishweek.org

06-Nov-2014 - Fans of Beigel's black-and-white cookies can breathe a sigh of relief. The century-old kosher goods company will still supply New York City with its trademark treat, despite the sale of the company’s baking facility, reported earlier this week.

On Wednesday morning, The Daily News reported that a real estate developer had bought the baking facility for the 100-plus-year-old Israel Beigel Baking Company in Clinton Hill, causing fears that the historic company would be shut down.

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New York Times

16-Sep-1998 - WITH Rosh ha-Shanah beginning on Sunday evening, the Israel Beigel Baking Company, like other classic Jewish bakeries in New York City, is in its high season for rugelach, honey cakes and traditional round New Year hallahs -- more than 10,000 of them.

New Yorkers who patronize the Fairway markets, the Second Avenue Deli and strictly kosher ma and pa groceries elsewhere in the New York area will find round hallahs and pastries from Beigel for sale there this week -- though few outside the small community of Bobover Hasidim of Borough Park, Brooklyn, know that this bakery in the Williamsburg section of the borough has a heroic past.

The Beigel family (the name is pronounced BUY-gull) had been in business in Cracow, Poland, for five generations by the time the Germans invaded in 1939. The Beigels are still revered for their efforts to keep much of the community from starving during the occupation, when bakers were some of the few Jews who had access to foodstuffs.

''The Nazis ordered us to make bread for the Germans, the ghetto and the nearby camps,'' said Nechama Beigel Wislicki, 78, of Borough Park, one of the few family members to survive Auschwitz. ''In the beginning, we had permission to go out from the ghetto and carried very big pots, four of us together, and brought soup and bread to the camps and factories where Jews were working.''

Soon the Beigel house became a place where anyone who was hungry could find not only food, but food prepared under the strictest kosher standards.

''When the Nazis herded Jews into the ghetto,'' Mrs. Wislicki said, ''the Jews sometimes sneaked to our apartment, where tables and benches were set up, and we cooked 50 liters of soup. Everybody got a nice piece of bread.''

On one occasion, she recalled, about 50 people were hidden in the Beigel home, sitting on hard benches arrayed around the formerly elegant parlor. Many were so exhausted and famished that they were slumped over their bowls.

''Our Rebbe, Schlomo Halberstam, came to us with his mother, his mother-in-law and his sister, because they didn't have where to go,'' Mrs. Wislicki said in Yiddish-influenced idiom. ''On Erev Yom Kippur'' -- the night before Yom Kippur, when a meal is eaten before the fast -- ''my mother didn't have what to cook. She served the noodles with water so they wouldn't be so dry, and maybe a piece of bread. There was nothing else.''

Several months later, the Germans liquidated the ghetto and sent the Jewish population, including the Beigel family, to concentration camps, where Mrs. Wislicki's parents and sister died. The three surviving children emigrated to New York in 1947, where they began their lives and the Beigel Bakery from scratch. ''It was a miracle,'' Mrs. Wislicki said. ''And now I have 3 children, 24 grandchildren and 33 great-grandchildren.'' Another branch of the family went to Israel before the war, and Beigel & Beigel is now a famous brand of baked goods there.

Wholesale Jewish bakeries like Beigel in Brooklyn and retailers like Gertel's and Moishe's on the Lower East Side of Manhattan make hallahs that are a definite cut above the common squishy aerated commercial variety. The dark crust gleams, and the inside has a perfect balance between body and lightness -- it's a serious hunk of bread without being heavy. The rugelach from Beigel look homemade -- they vary a bit in size. The cream cheese rugelach manage to be flaky like pastry and moist like brownies at the same time.

For Jack Lebewohl, the owner of the Second Avenue Deli, Beigel chocolate rugelach are the only ones to pass muster. ''They're a commercial bakery but still do it the old-fashioned way,'' he said.

Rafael Scharf, 83, who now lives in London, has vivid memories of one of Beigel's five branches in Cracow. ''I have this smell even now of the bread,'' he said. ''We Cracovians liked to joke about the name Beigel, that it came from this bakery.'' More likely, it was the other way around: beigel is Yiddish for bagel, and when the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II required Jews to take surnames in the late 18th century, what better one than this for a local bagel maker?

(Andrea Mohin/The New York Times)
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US Business Executive

11-Jun-2014 - Over the course of many years – 66 years to be exact –Israel Beigel Baking Company (Beigel’s) has become along-standing name in New York’s Jewish community and beyond, selling to large-scale food service accounts, health care facilities, club stores and retailers across the country. Beigel’s produces hundreds of baked goods daily, from its signature challah bread to Black and White Cookies, Rugelach, cakes, pies and countless pastries; however, the family-run company is still baking with the quality and care that’s found in a mom and pop operation.

“It’s very seldom you will find bakeries that do things as we do,” shares Joseph Folger, president and one of Beigel’s four partner-owners. “We produce hundreds of SKUs for Bringing old-fashioned European baking to a broad audience the bread, sweets and cakes. And, while we’re moving to more assembly lines and larger runs, we still go out of our way to support our smaller clientele.”

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Village Voice

22-Jun-2012 - If you ever meandered up Vanderbilt Avenue in search of the Brooklyn Flea, perhaps you've caught a whiff of a toasty, sweet fragrance that's strong enough to dismantle a conversation and prompt pedestrians to stop and wildly sniff the air. "What's that smell?! Baking pastries? Toasted bread?" It's something local residents have know for some time: The neighborhood reeks of baked goods. Beigel Bakery Company, a family-run kosher bakery that's been in operation since 1948, is the covert scent generator.