Jewish Rabbis find holiest ground in Yuma for their Passover meal

Every year a group of Orthodox Jewish Rabbis comes to Yuma to inspect the wheat that will be used for Passover meals on the East Coast.

In this week’s Home Grown, we take a look at the painstaking process that has been observed for thousands of years.

All of the bread for the Passover holiday has to be made from specially prepared wheat.

That is why this group of Ultra-Orthodox Jews come all the way from New York to a Christian farmer’s field to use his wheat for their Matzo, the unleavened bread which Jews eat during the Passover.

“The wheat has to be guarded from the time that it’s finished needing the ground until its harvesting, no water touched it, therefore the weather here is very special to us because it doesn’t rain here so we don’t have this problem,” Yisroel Tzvi Brody, a Rabbi in Brooklyn, N.Y. said.

If the wheat is touched by water they cannot use it.

“Wheat will not grow without rain but once it’s reached a certain stage of maturity then rain cannot fall on it anymore and it’s not easy to get that and over here it’s perfect for that,” Rabbi Brody said.

They wait until noon to harvest the wheat to make sure the morning dew is gone.

The Rabbis also inspect the farm equipment used to make sure the wheat is completely kosher.

“The machines have to be very carefully cleaned from the other wheat from the day before that may not have been guarded, this is no new thing. This is our 3,330th time we are doing this … this wasn’t made yesterday and the truth of the matter is that if not for Mr. Tim Dunn here, we would not be able to do all of this so easily,” Rabbi Brody said.

Once harvested, this wheat will go to a bakery in New York. From there, bakers begin preparing the bread five months before the Passover in April.

One pound of Passover Matzo costs about $25. The average family consumes about 20 pounds of Matzo over the eight-day period.

“It’s a very complicated matter so it’s not all that simple,” Brody said. “If the Matzo is not prepared in the right way then you just cannot eat it,” he added.

The Rabbis make sure that there is not even one kernel or a bit of dust … the wheat has to be completely pure.

The exact amount of money this brings in to the farm cannot be released to the public. H owever, Tim Dunn says it’s enough to greenlight production on his specialty crops.