Every other week you can find Kayla Rosenberg baking challah (traditional Jewish bread) with a team of volunteers from Challah for Hunger at the Hillel House. Proceeds from its sale are donated to various charities.
Inside the facility, Kayla leads a philanthropic operation in the dark and dank basement kitchen, kneading pounds of raw dough into silver tables. Her band of followers joins in on the labor, muscling out forty to sixty loaves in two nights. The first night in the kitchen consists of mixing and kneading the dough. Afterwards, sealed inside a steel bowl, the dough sits inside the refrigerator overnight. The following night, the dough, a mass of sticky starch, is strung out into long ropes. The rope-like dough is then gently braided, like a girl’s hair, into the traditional challah look — slightly resembling a tortoise’s shell. The braided challah is finished off with an egg wash before being thrown into a giant oven.
Those two nights can be long and tiring. With sore arms, the members of Challah for Hunger are more beaten than normal, tired, and aching — but the group normally remains light and cheerful throughout, exchanging laughs with one another, even if it’s a weeknight. Members like Rahel Fainchtein and Becca Fleischer are accustomed to the long baking hours; they are veteran bakers, somehow able to instinctively gauge the correct ratio of yeast, flour, and water with minimal assistance.
There is also plenty of room in the kitchen, with machinery spread far apart and utensils neatly tucked away. The kosher kitchen is spotless, a cardinal rule for any quality kitchen. In fact, kosher has a lot to do with the cleanliness of the kitchen. Everything is inspected. Whenever food is prepared, there is always an on-site supervisor, a mashgiach, whose only job is to make sure that all the food is kosher. With an eye kept on everything, the kitchen runs smoothly and cleanly. The Challah for Hunger members, though small in number, manage to accomplish a lot in only two nights.
In addition to the quasi-fun of midnight baking parties, the bakers choose to donate all the proceeds to various charities. The challah sells well. On a normal Thursday afternoon, the forty loaves nearly sell out at the GSU, as they have been for awhile now. With more than forty chapters, Challah for Hunger is widely popular on college campuses, recruiting volunteers from sources like Facebook and fraternities. The number of bakers fluctuates depending on the time of year, but every other Thursday, Kayla and her team manage to display a table full of challah.
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