Special-needs school gets lesson in matzah baking Dara Saldinger, of Dayton, grinds wheat kernels into flour at ShopRite of East Brunswick on Sunday. Erica Santiago, service director at Chabad Jewish Community Center, of New Windsor, N.Y., looks over the process. EAST BRUNSWICK - While many youngsters enjoy a good pizza pie, young adults from central New Jersey's specialneeds program, Jacob'sHands, got together to bake a very different kind of pie: a handbaked, round matzah pie. Now visible on supermarket shelves across the country, the original round forms of matzah, which in Hebrew are called shmurah matzah, bring back the personal touch over their rival machine-made counterparts, notes Rabbi Aryeh Goodman, director of Chabad of East Brunswick. At the ShopRite store on Route 18 in East Brunswick, CEO Richard Saker teamed up with Goodman last week and installed a "Model Matzah Bakery" for children, teens and their families to stop in and try their hand at baking this ancient bread that Jewish ancestors baked on their way out of Egyptian bondage some 3,300 years ago. "We saw this as an opportunity to give the kids in our community a novel, handson experience before Passover," said Goodman, whose organization is a local Jewish outreach and educational group and Hebrew school. With shows scheduled for two weeks prior to the Jewish holiday of Passover - which begins at sundown Saturday night- a special demonstration held Sunday afternoon at ShopRite brought together 30 special young adults to relive the exodus from Egypt, through pounding, rolling and baking their own matzahs. Beginning with a few sheaves of wheat, participants experienced the hustle and bustle to beat the timer to ensure that their crunchy breads were finished baking in the allotted 18minutes. The presentation featured the winnowing of the wheat kernels, grinding and sifting the wheat into fine flour, adding water, mixing and kneading the dough, rolling the dough with special rolling pins, poking holes in the dough to prevent rising, and baking, all within 18 minutes of when the water first touched the flour. Jewish teachings instruct that dough begins to rise after 18minutes, a product called chometz that it is forbidden to consume over Passover. The participants also heard the story of Passover from rabbinical student Shalom Ber Ginsburg of Chabad of East Brunswick, made their own arts and crafts matzah cover for their Seder tables, and received handmade matzahs imported from Israel.