COMING THIS FALL
A Sweet Treat:
A Swiss Bakery
RUTH ROVNER SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS
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nside the cheerful, well-
stocked bakery, the customers
are already lined up, and Guisi
Fischbacher moves briskly as
she wraps breads, cuts cakes,
packages cookies. The customers
have a tempting array of baked
goods from which to choose: spe-
cialty breads, cakes, croissants,
rolls, and cookies of all sorts.
All of these items and more —
including Swiss chocolates, truf-
fles, biscuits, cheeses — are ful-
ly kosher. Die Koscher Backerei
in Zurich is the only kosher bak-
ery in all of Switzerland.
My visit to this unique bakery
Reuben's wife, who has just come
in. She'll be driving me to the
bakery headquarters at Brauer-
strasse #110.
On the ride, I taste several of
the sweet rolls that Mona Bollag
has wrapped for me; they are
moist and deliciously flavored.
It's just a short drive through
downtown Zurich and soon we're
walking into a building where
once again the aroma is tanta-
lizing.
The front part of the building
is another bakery, smaller than
the one on Waffenplatz, where
Mr. Bollag's products are sold. On
PHOTO BY RUTH ROVNER
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Guisi Fischbacher behind the bakery counter.
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turns out to be a sweet adven-
ture, a change of pace from more
typical sightseeing as well as a
chance to see how Jewish entre-
preneurship created a highly suc-
cessful enterprise.
"You take the #13 tram to Waf-
fenplatz, then get out and walk
one block — and you'll smell it!"
predicted Reuben Bollag, owner
of the bakery, who readily invit-
ed me to come to see it when I
called the day before.
His prediction proved true. A
sweet aroma was wafting out as
soon as I approached the bakery,
located on a pleasant tree-lined
street not far from the center of
Zurich.
Inside, the baked goods are on
display behind a large glass
counter where Guisi waits on cus-
tomers. There are dark breads
and light breads, challahs, inter-
esting-looking cookies which
Guisi identifies for me as
spitzbuebe, volgelnestli and
schoggi.
"We sell and we deliver all over
Switzerland and even as far as
Munich," says Mona Bollag,
shelves behind the counter are
breads, rolls, cakes and other
baked goods. But beyond the bak-
ery itself is the nerve center of the
operation: the office where
Reuben Bollag runs a thriving
business.
"We bake five different kinds
of bread every day, and we use
only water, flour, yeast and salt
— no preservatives whatsoever,"
emphasizes Reuben Bollag. Per-
sonable and energetic — he hard-
ly sits still for a minute — he's
taking time from a typically busy
day to give me a glimpse of the
challenges of a kosher bakery.
After checking on a few major
orders, he leads the way to the
very spacious lower level which
is the heart of production. It is
here that flour is stored, bread is
baked, pastries are made, with a
separate room entirely devoted
to Passover pastry.
His staff includes two full-time
bakers and two pastry men who
are busy at work as we walk
through. They turn out a whop-
ping total of 2,500 pastries every
week, and 1,000 loaves of bread.