World’s Longest Challah Bake
Four Emanuel High School students, Willow Gelin (Year 7), Arella Codorean (Year 7), Oriel Levy, (Year 8) and Mayan Granot (Year 10) joined in Sydney’s World Longest Challah Bake.
Sponsored by JNF, Grandma Moses Bakery and The Shabbat Project Sydney this Challah Bake celebrated Jewish tradition and community by attempting to create the world’s longest challah. Below are pictures of our student participants and a word by Asher Klein, our Informal Jewish Educator, who accompanied them to the Challah Bake.
Rabbi Daniel Siegel
Australian Jews bake world’s longest challah
Record-setting piece of bread is 32 feet long, made from 150 pounds of dough
By JTA15 November 2019
A kosher bakery in Sydney, Australia, breaks the Guinness World Record for the longest challah. (The Australian Jewish News/Facebook via JTA)
A kosher bakery in Sydney, Australia, has broken the Guinness World Record for the longest challah. Grandma Moses Bakery, in partnership with the Jewish National Fund chapter in New South Wales, broke the record on Thursday, according to a Facebook post from the group.
The record-setting challah clocked in at more than 32 feet long and required over 150 pounds of dough and ten hours to bake. The previous record, set in Brooklyn in 2015, was a 20-foot challah.
Asher Klein
Make Bread, Not War
On Thursday last week, I accompanied four Emanuel student representatives, to Maroubra synagogue to participate in baking the world’s longest Challah. That may sound like an exaggeration, but I mean that literally. We had it checked by the folks at Guinness World Records: over 10 meters long! Our students added a hefty number of plaits to a challah that was already longer than any I’d ever seen… and it was only 1/10th done!
We got to taste the fruits of our labour the next day, in anticipation of Shabbat, and it tasted pretty good. The atmosphere at the bake was one of great determination but also of a tight community. Sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that our Sydney Jewish community is much larger than our Emanuel bubble but when we all come together to bake a ridiculously long (and slightly impractical) challah, all our differences seem to fade away. Perhaps we can all come together and bake a little bread together a little more often.
Arella Codorean
It was so much fun and showed the Jewish community all working together to achieve a goal. I think that making the challah made me realise how great it is to be able to get together with family on Shabbat – by making challah and spending time with them.
Willow Gelin
The Biggest Challah Bake was an enjoyable experience for me because it allowed me to connect with some of the Jewish community and to Shabbat. I think that other Jewish kids in Sydney should get together and do things like this because it enables us to make friendships and connections that could last a long time.
