This year a lot of Streit’s Passover product was emblazoned with their 100 year centennial, a New York State family business that started in 1925, still going strong, and still a family business in 2025!
Anyone in business (or who watches the business scene) knows how significant such a milestone is: surviving depressions and world wars, the Holocaust, the advent of automation, computer age and internet, changing religious and geographic demographics and tastes and styles. 1925 to 2025 is not only 100 years but a century of tremendous change, transformation and upheaval.
Keeping a business model in business for so long and through all of that takes a lot of fortitude, perseverance, dedication and vision. All it takes to do in a family business is one generation of mismanagement, or one generation to sell out and be swallowed up by some major corporation or private equity firm. It takes so much stick-with-it, and to pass that down from one generation of the family business to the next.
Now take this message to the Jewish People and Passover: Our people have been through so much! Our history is a roller-coaster full of ups and downs, persecution and expulsions, problems and challenges, highs and lows. Our numbers have been small, our assets often minimal, and at terribly sad dips in our history the prognosis seemed bleak. The trajectory didn’t point to Passover Seders celebrated far and wide on nearly every continent with much festivity and fanfare. But here we are!
This is a testament to each generation of Judaism being fully invested, getting the mission and passing it on. As a people we’re only as strong as the weakest link in our long chain of history. Right now, that’s us. Gotta keep Judaism going strong!