matzohs - made the same way for 3,000 years

It had to be done in 18 minutes flat.

In a Brooklyn bakery, each fresh batch of Passover matzoh was timed from the moment the flour touched water till the unleavened bread left the oven _ dough worked fast to keep it from rising.

It must stay flat "to remind us of when the Jews went out of Egypt and they didn't have time to let the bread rise," said Chana Drizin, a 10-year-old bakery volunteer perched atop a woodpile that helped fueled the oven's roaring flames.

With Passover arriving on Wednesday at sundown, producing enough matzoh for the holiday meal without breaking tradition is a deadline met with religious fervor at this Brooklyn business.

Behind a windowless front, the boisterous, crowded bakery has churned out more than 80 tons of matzoh in the seven months leading to Passover. At $15 a pound, the matzoh is shipped or hand-delivered to about 70 countries, from France, England and Greece to Congo, Vietnam and India.

On a recent visit during the last week of production, one room in the bakery was alive with the chatter of women sitting around a long table, rolling out dough and announcing "Matzoh!" in Hebrew as they handed off the matzoh rounds ready for the oven.

Their voices, in Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian and English, mixed with the sound of clattering rolling pins in the frenzy to get as many matzohs out as possible in 18 minutes, when the dough starts to rise.

Eating leavened bread during Passover is forbidden by Jewish law, which is strictly followed in an Orthodox Jewish movement called Chabad Lubavitch that started in 18th-century Russia and spread worldwide.

Under the late Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, their leader in Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighborhood, the Lubavitchers became the most outward-looking of ultrareligious Jews, displaying giant menorahs in public places and building Chabad centers from Sao Paulo to Bangkok. The more than 200,000 faithful use satellite and Internet technology to communicate their beliefs; even the matzoh can be ordered via the Chabad Web site, with recipes included.

But when it comes to actually baking matzoh, "it's been done the same way for 3,000 years," said Rabbi Mendel Feller, who was bringing the matzohs back to St. Paul, Minn.

This "bread of affliction" plays a key role in the ritual meal celebrating the Jews' freedom from slavery under the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. It's a "mitzvah" _ a sacred command _ to eat matzoh.

The handmade Lubavitch bread is among dozens on the market _ many of them mass-produced by food industry giants like Manischewitz and Streit's.

This Brooklyn matzoh is made at the Shmurah Matzoh Bakery in Crown Heights, owned by the Dubrowsky and Tenenbaum families _ a business started in the last century on Manhattan's Lower East Side by Russian Jews.

"Shmurah" means "guarded" in Hebrew: Someone must always watch the flour so no water comes in contact with it until the bread is made. The vigilance started in August, when the wheat was harvested from fields in upstate New York, ground and put into bags stored in the bakery's basement.

At the bakery, a digital timer was taped to a wall above the big steel bowl where flour finally met water, and was kneaded into dough by lightning-fast hands.

"It's a six-second loaf! I have good arm muscles," said a beaming Yanko Klein, an Israeli-born rabbinical student in Crown Heights.

After eight-hour days of kneading, for months, he's exhausted. "But it's a very holy thing to do this."

Klein was handed the flour through a small window cut into the wall of a cubicle where another man scooped it out of cardboard boxes into a pot that goes on a scale.

"I'm here to find a wife!" announced the flour-sifter, Michoel Natanilov, in Russian. Born in Tajikistan, he came to Brooklyn looking for a Lubavitcher bride.

From another cutout window appeared a hand offering Klein the water for the dough.

"It's fun," said Dovid Kupfer, 15, who earns $7 an hour carefully measuring water all day under a bare lightbulb.

The bakery may also be reserved to custom-make matzoh _ as Chana, the 10-year-old, and her extended family did one day.

"Helping bake our own bread brings it all together for us _ it adds an extra touch to Passover," said her uncle, Zev Drizin.

This bakery would have fit well in an old Russian village, but the 21st century had definitely arrived: A cell phone wire dangled from the ear of a youth as he hung matzohs on a long wooden rod, six at a time.

The matzohs were then passed to the official baker, who was sweating as he slid the matzohs into the oven for about 20 seconds, to bake at a temperature as high as 2,000 degrees.

After the steaming, slightly burned rounds were quickly pulled out, each was inspected by a man wearing gloves to make sure they were thoroughly baked, then lined up in freshly papered boxes that go to the front of the bakery.

Then, said Drizin's brother-in-law, Mendel Schneerson, "like fine cigars, they have to be packed so they don't crack."