Drawn to Tradition

Behind a spotless glass counter, owner Moshe Zelig wraps meat for customers at his Orange County Kosher Market, doing swift business this week as Jews from Orange County and beyond stock up before the High Holidays that begin Friday with Rosh Hashana.

The market, which opened eight months ago in a small Tustin strip mall, already has a base of loyal customers who say it has been a blessing for central and south Orange County’s Jewish community members, who in the past have made much longer trips to find kosher food.

“I used to have to drive up to Los Angeles to get some of these products,” said Annette Garber of Rancho Santa Margarita, checking items off a long shopping list while Zelig wrapped the 16 chicken legs she had just ordered. On those out-of-town trips, she said, she used to buy kosher wine by the case, and she even put an extra freezer in her garage so she could store precious baked goods.

Zelig’s market and a small Judaica shop, Gifts by Agam, have made the mall a popular shopping enclave for south Orange County’s Jewish community.

“The Orange County Kosher Market is going to take off,” said Rabbi David Eliezrie, president of the Rabbinical Council of Orange County and Long Beach. “All we need now is one person to open a kosher pizza shop, and we’re in business.”

Out of convenience and loyalty, people like to patronize stores close to home, Eliezrie said. He believes the kosher market’s popularity also reflects a rebirth of traditionalism in Judaism, not only among Orthodox congregations but among Reform and Conservative as well.

When Eliezrie, rabbi at Congregation Beth Meir HaCohone-Chabad in Yorba Linda, first came to Orange County 16 years ago, he said, there were no hotels here doing kosher catering. Now, half a dozen have kosher certification, he said.

“There’s a tremendous transformation going on in modern Jewish life to be more observant,” Eliezrie said.

Also boosting demand for kosher products is renewed concern about health among the general population--vegetarians, for instance, who might buy kosher because of the stringent food-preparation guidelines.

A booming Jewish population in south Orange County also bodes well for the success of Zelig’s market.

Chelle Friedman, campus operations director of the Jewish Federation of Orange County in Costa Mesa, said, “We’re getting a lot of young families who are now choosing to affiliate with congregations in South County. We’re seeing the North County synagogues stay pretty static.”

Joel Landau, rabbi of Irvine’s Beth Jacob Congregation and vice president of the rabbinical council, agreed. “I’d say that South County is growing in terms of the Jewish population and North County is shrinking.”

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He and others credit a general demographic shift in tandem with construction of new synagogues and two Jewish day schools in South County.

Orange County, with a Jewish population of about 70,000, does have one other kosher butcher shop, Los Alamitos Kosher Market, but getting there is a schlep for far-flung South County residents. The Kosher Bite Deli in Laguna Hills sells kosher products but does not have rabbinical certification.

That designation is important, indicating that a specialist is on-site to inspect food and make sure it has had proper supervision throughout preparation. Food that passes U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspections still may not meet standards for kosher certification. For instance, the government allows trace amounts of insect parts in food, but that would not be kosher.

Market owner Zelig, 52, lives in Northridge and used to run a deli in Los Angeles. He closed it last winter because business was slow, and reopened in Tustin. He has not yet recouped his $250,000 investment, he said, but hopes to do so by the time the High Holidays end with Yom Kippur, which begins at sundown Oct. 8.

Zelig, a small man with big tinted glasses, greets his customers by name in a booming voice. He jokes with people, asks about their families--and remembers their cold-cut preferences.

“Thank God, it’s busy,” he said on a recent harried afternoon as he wiped down a counter. “People get attention here. Whatever they want!”

The shelves of his tidy store are stocked with a wide variety of food and other products: dairy-free ice-cream sandwiches, bulk packages of matzo, frozen rugelach, 16 kinds of bagels, hard-to-find specialty foods from Israel, South Africa and the East Coast, Shabbat candles, even Israeli magazines, neatly shrink-wrapped.

Some customers are non-Jews who discovered the market while shopping elsewhere in the strip mall and keep coming back for the exceptional service.

Jewish shoppers might be able to find kosher prepackaged cold cuts at supermarkets, Zelig said, but might not be savvy enough to discern the symbols from the 345 certifying kosher agencies worldwide.

Tim Hill, an employee of the rabbinical council, is the kosher supervisor on-site at the Tustin market to make sure all products are properly prepared and packaged.

He said keeping kosher has become more complicated as food production and artificial colors and preservatives have evolved.

“Kosher is more than just making a blessing on the food,” he said. “The chemistry and engineering of the food are incredibly complex. You hear stories of rabbis on their knees with flashlights, crawling through holes in a food plant to see where a pipe goes.”

Hill recently spent two weeks tracking down the rabbinical supervisors of a box of unmarked Egyptian perch, which they immediately pulled from shelves. “We guarantee the public that the food sold is kosher,” he said. “We run a very tight ship.”