Mrs. Suri Jaroslawitz’s challah bakes have become legendary. Here’s a taste of the experience

Globetrotting, by all accounts, was never on Mrs. Suri Jaroslawitz’s bucket list, nor did she ever intend to become a public personality, but life has a funny way of blindsiding the most unsuspecting people and, well, here she is, a chassidishe-babbi-from-Boro-Park-turned-globetrotting public personality.

For many years, Mrs. Jaroslawitz and her husband were the owners of Mendel’s Pizza in Boro Park. She was a teacher, and later an assistant principal, when her husband decided to open the store.

“My husband needed my help, so my job was to be at his side,” Suri says simply. She quit her principal job, and for the next 30 years ran the busy Brooklyn establishment with the same drive and energy one would use to run a Fortune 500 company.

Twelve years ago, a friend walked into the store. “Suri,” she said, “you know my daughter didn’t have children for years. We needed a yeshuah, and I was advised by Rebbetzin Kanievsky z”l to organize 40 women to come and be mafrish challah together in one room, all answering Amen to each other’s brachos and davening together. By the next year my daughter was a mother, and now every year I do it again. Will you come?”

Suri laughed. “Hafrashas challah?” she asked. “I’ve been doing hafrashas challah every single day for decades in the back of my store — even more than once a day! Pizzas, calzones, knishes, they’re all made from dough and need challah taken, and I’m the one who does it. I’ll be happy to daven for whoever you need in my store, but a whole gathering? I’m not the type for these bubbe maisehs.”

Her friend pressed her to come see what a beautiful experience this was, so the following day, the day before Erev Yom Kippur, Suri joined a gathering of women who came together to daven and do this mitzvah together… and something cataclysmic happened to Suri Jaroslawitz on that day.

“It’s true that I’d been taking challah for years,” she says, “but this was something different. So many women davening and answering Amen to one another — it was next level. Women have three special mitzvos, but hafrashas challah is the only one that can be done anytime, anywhere, by any woman, and in a large gathering simultaneously. The power of the joint tefillos, the brachos, and the answering Amen — itself a declaration of emunah — can’t be measured and can’t be matched by anything else!”

Somehow, Suri found herself initiating more and more gatherings of women to do the mitzvah of hafrashas challah together. At first, she looked for opportunities — “excuses,” she calls them — to gather women to be mafrish challah together in the back of her store. Rosh Chodesh, Rochel Imeinu’s yahrtzeit, Shabbos Shirah, week of shlissel challah, etc. Slowly the idea took off and women began forming their own groups in homes, but often asked her to lead them.

“You don’t need me!” is one of Suri’s popular quotable quotes. “Forget me, don’t wait, just go do your own — get the women together and just do it!”

But women want Suri. Vivacious, energetic, and dynamic, Suri has magnetic appeal — something magical — that makes women want this chassidiste to lead their groups. She speaks faster than you can keep up; if you accidentally stop listening for ten seconds you just missed three stories and two gematrias — and all this without a single written prompt in front of her. She’s on a roll, telling story after story, quoting maamarei Chazal and pesukim, tying it together with fire-and-brimstone rock-solid hashkafah. She’s been all over; there are no “types” when it comes to Suri Jaroslawitz’s challah bakes. Litvish, chassidish, Sephardic, Modern Orthodox, yeshivish, and anyone and everyone in between, the message of emunah and tefillah breaks every barrier and stereotype.

Says Shainy, “I’m somewhat of an avowed kalte Litvak: I don’t appreciate the ‘trending’ segulos, fad vending machine-type things like stand on your head for 40 days and poof! You got your yeshuah! But a friend asked me to come to a hafrashas challah gathering, and I figured that even though I don’t know if there’s any makor for the 40 thing, any group of women saying brachos and answering Amen is certainly a zechus, so I went. Well, I heard Suri speak and it was unlike any of this new age hocus-pocus stuff. The tefillos in that room weren’t regular. Several of my family members are already so burnt out from davening for something that we need for many years already, and we feel like Hashem is just not going to give it to us. But you know that mashal that every third grader says at the Seder about standing at Har Sinai was like entering a perfume shop… just the experience of listening to this woman who believes so strongly in the power of tefillah and connecting to Hashem was exactly like that — you couldn’t not be moved! She lit a fire of bitachon in every person there — certainly in me! My tefillah for this thing has been recharged. It will happen, even if it didn’t yet.”

“People want to know what the makor is for this,” Suri shares. “And I’ll tell you — there is no makor! You know why? Because it’s not a segulah, a segulah needs a makor. But this isn’t a segulah, it’s a peulah, a way of bringing about unified tefillah, thereby bringing brachah and yeshuah into our lives.”