MILWAUKEE – Dozens of men worked furiously as a digital clock on the wall silently counted down from 18 minutes: “10:14,” “10:13,” “10:12” …
“Ten minutes!” yelled one of the men, glancing at the digital master.
At the Twerski community’s annual late-night matzah-making event, you’ve got just 18 minutes from the moment the water touches the flour to make matzah – otherwise, it’s assumed there could be time for leavening. And when you’re making an Orthodox Jewish community’s matzah for Passover, leavening is not the goal.
“Isn’t this fun?” remarked a smiling Rabbi Benzion Twerski, a leader of the community, after carrying a bucket of well water (it must be pure) to a dough-mixing station in his backyard on Milwaukee’s west side. Yes, like an Olympic sprint, but for matzah, not medals.
An outcropped room at the back of his home was filled, from 8-10 p.m., with dozens of volunteer dough-handlers. During each 18-minute sprint, men and boys furiously flattened dough, rolled it, and spiked it with holes so it wouldn’t rise. Then, they threw it over polls that were quickly hand-delivered to an adjacent tent with an outdoor oven. The fiery oven, imported from Israel about ten years ago, was the engine of this temporary matzah factory on March 23, 2026. The event would be repeated several more times before Pesach.
It does not specifically say “18 minutes to make matzah for Passover” in the Torah, of course. Rabbi Chaim Twerski explained it during a few-minutes break between the 18-minute sprints: “The Torah just says they can’t become chametz (leavened bread). Now we have to know what that means; a lot of things are in the Torah, but then we have to figure out what does that mean? Like tefillin – ‘Wear them as a sign on your arm and on your head.’ How do I get a black box? Details that aren’t explicit? Oral tradition …”
For Pesach matzah, that means even during the 18-minute sprint, someone is handling dough so it doesn’t have time to rest – to do everything possible to keep leavening at bay. “Then, if you put in the matzah without holes in the oven, it’s going to puff up like a pizza,” Chaim Twerski said. Thus, the spiked rollers run over the matzah just before it’s thrown over poles for transport to the oven, followed almost instantly by more matzah dough from the other table, for more spikes. It’s a high-speed, halachically-driven assembly line.
“Every table cover gets changed every 18 minutes, for every surface – everything that we touch now is fresh.”
There are dozens of large matzah bakeries in Brooklyn, New York, that do this on a much larger scale, with different equipment, in the weeks before Passover. And there are many people making matzah absolutely everywhere. But to have a small community come together in this way may be uncommon, Chaim said.
But not much time for chit-chat about that. Everyone got back into position, the clock was started, dough mixed, then flattened at tables, then sent to the hand-spike men and flung onto poles.
Then, Rabbi Yitzchak Lubchansky bellowed at the top of his lungs, to overcome the thudding and clanging in the room: “Matzahs!”
With that, someone came to grab a poll draped in matzah dough and race it like a spear for the fired-up oven.
“We need more poles!”
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