SWAMPSCOTT – It has simple ingredients: “flour and water, plus flour and water, plus flour and water,” as Rabbi Yossi Lipsker explained Tuesday.But add dance music, lessons about the story of Passover, and about 50 kids, teachers and parents, and you’ve got the ingredients for the Model Matzah Bakery.”My passion and responsibility, and I’m fortunate it’s both, is to share the joy of our traditions with as many people as possible and to bring it alive in as many ways as possible,” said Lipsker.The Model Matzah Bakery is basically a mobile matzah factory that offers people a chance to bake matzah and learn about the story of Passover. Passover began this Friday at sundown, and is a weeklong Jewish commemoration of the deliverance of the ancient Hebrews from slavery in Egypt.The matzah bakery was set up in Chabad Lubavitch in Swampscott Tuesday afternoon, where the local Hebrew School students gathered to try their hand at baking. Lipsker has taken the factory throughout the North Shore and region, setting it up in temples, at Whole Foods in Lynnfield and even at nursing homes.The production began with the traditional Hebrew greeting of “Shalom Aleichem,” and then Lipsker introduced special guest Moses, whose favorite holiday is Passover, “because he led the Jews from Egypt,” as one youngster shouted out.The flour and water were kept isolated, or prepared “shmurah,” into their own specific booths, so they did not come into contact until they were put in the bowl.Meanwhile, student volunteers ground the flour and mixed the flour and water (with a little assistance from Pharoah, or Rabbi Moshe Liberow, who Lipsker said was “doing part of his 2,000 years of community service for all he did to the Jewish slaves in Egypt.”)Then each child got a handful of dough, a cylindrical wood dowel to roll out the bread, and set to making the matzah. As the matzah baked for 18 minutes (no longer and it is no longer matzah, Lipsker explained) the students answered questions about the Passover Seder, including why Prophet Elijah has a cup of wine at the feast, and how Jews remind themselves of the hardship of slavery by saving the majority of a piece of matzah for later.Then came the matzah. The kids ate it excitedly, but it was, well, matzah.Baking matzah, of course, was not the point of the day, however.”This congregation has been great,” mother Samara Feldman, of Marblehead, said Tuesday. “My son has learned more about the Jewish tradition here than anywhere else.”
