Hi, everyone, my name is Na'ama Shefi, I'm the founder of the Jewish Food Society. We're a nonprofit organization that is based in New York City, that works to preserve, celebrate and revitalize Jewish culinary heritage from around the world. Thank you so much for the POLIN museum, for organizing this fantastic festival and for having us. When we do what we do, we believe that recipes really carry with them the marrow of who we are as individuals, as families and as people. Family recipes and the stories behind them are in danger of being lost. And a p'tcha, here in the picture, a calf foot jelly. Back in the days, it used to be one of the most popular dishes among Ashkenazi Jews, but today many people never tasted p'tcha and for sure don't know how to make it. Our goal is to preserve beloved Jewish food like p'tcha and others and to celebrate new ones. So we are as likely to share Grandmother's old world's kreplach recipe and at the same time, we are reviving and pushing forward new recipes like a maple glaze challah from Vermont. What they all have in common is this. They tell the stories of how Jewish people live and love, how they celebrate and mourn and the way they cook. Now, I'll share a little bit about myself and the motivation behind Jewish Food Society. So here in the left is me loving gefilte fish since nineteen eighty three, I was born and raised in a small kibbutz in the center of Israel. It's called Givat ha Shlosha. And for those who don't know, kibbutz is a collective community that was traditionally based on agriculture. It was truly a great place to grow up. We were working bare foot, playing outside long hours, picking pomelos and pomegranates from the trees, and I even got to move to my own little cottage at the age of 13, as was the custom. But not everything was idyllic. The communal dining room here on the right served food for five hundred people three times a day. So really resulting in a pretty bland and mostly Ashkenazi menu.

Think: army food.

So what the food loving girls to do? I begged, I begged my parents to drive me to taste different foods, and this was a big deal because in my kibbutz in the 80s, all the cars were shared within  the community. So we only had 18 Subaru to share. So you really needed a good reason to get a car for, you know, for medical reasons or to see a show in the big city or anything like that. But luckily, my parents supported my passion and drove me to this adventure. So they drove me to Carcassonne, which is a nearby village, to try grilled meats and hummus. And they drove me to Tel Aviv, to the Yemenite Quarter to enjoy Yemenite soup and lahoh and many times to the nearby city, Betah Tikva, to try herring. So food really became my connection to the world outside of the kibbutz, a real medium for identity exploration. Now, sorry, the big revelation happened when I met my husband, so the first time I attended a Shabbat dinner at my grandma in law place, I was absolutely amazed by her incredible spread of dishes. There were Al-Ghamdi goods and burekitas and stuffed onion and little tomatoes and endless variation of eggplant salads and more and more. But even more, I was taken by the stories behind each of these dishes that really represented Nonna's immigration story.

She was born in Izmir and moved to the island of Froths and from there to Zimbabwe and from there to Israel. And I felt strong urgency to protect her delicious legacy and preserve her story. So really without knowing it, she planted the seeds for Jewish Food Society. Before I planned to officially start Jewish Food Society, I worked in different capacities and position curating, organizing, researching and writing about Jewish and Israeli food. But when I moved to New York City, I was really surprised that when people thought about Jewish food, they really meant bagels and lox or matzo balls. And at a time I was reading the Book of Jewish Food by Claudia Roden. And I was so inspired by our approach to food writing and food research and by her stories about disappearing communities. And I thought that it would be important to introduce New Yorkers to different kind of Jewish food. At the time, I told my husband, I'm going to take some money from our savings and it was like, OK, what what you're going to do? And I told him, I'm going to open an Iraqi Jewish pop up restaurant. And the plan was to run the restaurant to serve like I had a mini business plan serving 20 guests every night.

And we ended up serving a hundred twenty people every night with this huge line around the block of people waiting in the snow to try Jewish Iraqi food. So you know what it showed me, this experience? It was clear that people were curious to learn about the diversity of Jewish food and the Jewish food deserts at home. And kubbeh here in the picture is a labor intensive dish that requires a lot of time. And like the other dishes and food traditions are in danger. And I really believe that we need to protect them. And the best way to protect the cuisine is simply by knowing it and by cooking it. So with that understanding that many of these recipes and food traditions are about to disappear, I knew I had to start Jewish Food Society as a place to really connect culturally without any political or religious strings attached. So our work today is centered around two main areas. We are building an online archive of family recipes and the stories behind them. And in order to bring the archive to life, we host all sorts of public programs. Our approach is extremely global. We aim to communicate a diverse representation of Jewish culinary heritage. So we currently live on, sorry, here.

I'm sorry, let's try this again. OK.

So our approach, again, is global, we currently have five hundred recipes and the stories behind them on the archive and the recipes come from places as far apart as Toronto, Morocco, India and Warsaw, with news stories added every week. So a few words about our archive process: recipes are either submitted through our online form or by targeted outreach by our team. Once we find a great recipe with a compelling story, we arrange a cooking session in the cook's home, obviously pre pandemic, and hopefully we will resume and it will feel safe.

Ok. Yes, I have some issues with the slider. Bear with me.

So we cook with these outstanding home cooks to really understand their methods and techniques and also to use these very intimate setting of the kitchen to gather personal anecdotes and artifacts from the family history. So here in the picture is a lovely session we had with Luba in Queens here in New York that she's a cook from St. Petersburg. She learnt how to cook at the age of 12 when her mom became ill during World War Two. She immigrated to the States in the 90s and brought all of our traditional recipes with her. She taught us how to make stuffed chicken egg and poppyseed cake with a very lovely technique that is on our website. So after the cooking session, we bring the recipe back to the test kitchen and translate it into a working recipe that people at home can cook and succeed. Next, our editor get in touch with the cook and conduct an in-depth interview. And once we have the recipe and story, we will do a photo shoot to present the recipe in what we called Grandma chic, honoring the integrity and roots of the recipe while presenting it in a more modern way. So here picture is our image that we created for the archive of Luba's cake. Then when we have the image, we have all of these pieces together and published an official entry on the archive. As I mentioned before, to... Again, these slides, OK, to bring the archive to life, we host all sorts of public programs. They could be cooking classes, Shabbat dinners, educational panels, really lots of creative programs. So here in the picture is an Israeli Shabbat dinner we hosted in Brooklyn a few summers ago where we grilled on the sidewalk, Israeli style.

Our signature event is a storytelling and tasting event that we call schmaltzy, and the concept is very simple. We invite five storytellers to take the stage and tell a compelling and personal food related story, and the storyteller can be celebrity chefs or tech entrepreneurs or poets or anyone really with a good story to tell and talent in the kitchen, so after the storytelling portion of the night, the audience is treated to try the dishes behind the stories. So here in the in the picture is the current owner of Katz's Deli Inner City, Shir Sherazi, with pastrami sandwich from the story. Inspired by the line Schmaltzy event, we very recently launched our new storytelling podcast with the very same name Schmaltzy, and now more than ever, we believe in the power of storytelling to unite our community when life events are not so possible. Schmaltzy the podcast is a way to share personal stories with universal themes like family, love, loss and identity. So I really invite you to tune in next week on October eight to irrigate an app that is actually revisits Jake Katz's Deli life story. So thank you so much for taking the time to learn about Jewish Food Society, our research on how diverse and global Jewish cuisine really is, I think about it as a living and breathing kitchen. That is a direct reflection of rich history, wonderings, dietary laws, Shabbat and holidays. And if you have a special recipe, a special family recipes that you would love to preserve, please, please get in touch with us. We would love to hear from you. And speaking about family recipes, I'm going to share a quick demo of a recipe for chocolate salami from my mom, so stay tuned.

Thank you.

So hi, I'm in New York in my kitchen, and I'm going to do a quick demo on my family recipe, a chocolate salami, as I said, from my mom, Pnina. She was born in Warsaw in nineteen forty seven and moved to Israel when she was four years old. So she definitely has memories from Leszno street in Warsaw where she grew up. And this recipe is something that she used to make throughout my childhood is a very basic preparation. And as I mentioned before the kibbutz, we ate in one communal dining room and kitchen. So people didn't even have basic kitchens in our home so that was something that she could make pretty easy. Basically, the recipe has very simple stages. We are going to make a sauce made out of cocoa powder, butter, milk, sugar and any spirit or wine you have around. And then we'll pour it into what we called an Israel petit-beurre, or biskwitim, tea biscuit, broken up cookies and we'll shape it into a salami log. We gonna freeze it for a few hours cut it and serve it.

So let's do it.

So I made, I've been mixing the sauce before. I put it here.

Yeah, you can see it from here. And I broke the cookies, so basically I'm just going to, and these are like five cups of cookies and I'm just going to pour the sauce over the cookies. And for the fun I'm going to add some crushed almonds.

And some raisins that you can definitely skip or add.

Whatever you like. So we're going to mix. It's a little hot

but that's the idea, so it will all stick together. Actually I'm going to use a spoon.



So it mix it very well so it gonna absorb all, the cookies would absorb chocolate sauce. And we are almost ready for the major stage, for shaping it into the log shape.

Ok, so this is ready, it looks like this.

First we use some baking paper.

I make some room.

Basically, I'm just taking these recipe calls for two logs so take half the mixture place it in the center, from this angle I hope actually you can see how it looks.

And then basically with the paper I'm going to spread it out.

Give it another roll

And give it a twist on the edges so it's well together. I'm going to put this in the fridge for few good hours. And just wanted to show you how it looks when it's ready. So that's what I made this one last night. So I'm just going to.

Slide a few.

Voila! Chocolate salami.

We have the recipe on Jewish Food Society.org, so I hope you give it a try. Thank you so much. Bye.