You could smell the unmistakable aroma of simmering brisket, roasted chicken and matzo ball soup all the way up and down Kingston Avenue in Atlantic City.
Around 1985, I began writing a monthly column called “Backstage” for Frances Freedman’s much-missed Atlantic City magazine. The only thing management requested of me was that I have an Atlantic City address. I gladly complied and found a tiny studio apartment on Kingston, complete with a Murphy bed, that was almost on a beach block.
Despite the wonderful, summer fragrance of the ocean and the Boardwalk, those beautiful aromas were overtaken by that of brisket and chicken. I figured that someone along the block was a good kosher chef, but after walking up and down Kingston Avenue several times, I discovered that these smells I recalled from my childhood emanated from a home located on 119 South Kingston Ave. The sign outside said Zawid’s.
After speaking to some friends about my “discovery,” I found out that Zawid’s was not only the Atlantic City area’s premier kosher caterer, but if a reservation were made well in advance, it was possible to eat at the Zawid home, which was particularly festive – food-wise – around one of the Jewish holidays. After an incredible dinner there one evening, that defined the phrase, “too much great food,” I never forgot it and I returned there often.
What I was not aware of at the time was the incredible history of Zawid’s, and the history of its owners, Jack and Rose Zawid.
While I got to know Mr. and Mrs. Zawid slightly over the years until their 2003 closing, the detailed history of Rose, Jack and the business is chronicled in great detail at the Sara and Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center, housed at Stockton University.
Jack, born Yankel Zawidowicz in Poland in 1913, first studied to be a lawyer until war broke out in 1939 and he was forced to live in a ghetto to toil in what was called “work detail.”
He escaped for a brief time, only to discover upon his return that his wife, children, parents and brothers and sisters were all killed. He escaped again and lived underground until the end of the war. He met his second wife, Rose, in Warsaw, where he traveled after the war.
Rose’s history was similar. Rose (Rachel) Spiegel was born in Lubin, Poland, in 1925. When she was 16, the Germans occupied the city and Jews were sent into the ghettos where Nazis killed her mother and brother. Rose managed to survive, and at the end of the war, ended up in Warsaw, where she met and married Jack in 1945.
The couple waited in American-occupied Germany for three years before they were permitted to come to America. They finally made it in 1949, and landed jobs in Baltimore and New York City before finding permanent work as chicken farmers 30 miles west of Atlantic City in Weymouth Township, in a village known as Dorothy. They spent 10 years as chicken farmers before deciding to move to Atlantic City and open a small guest house.
Zawids’ catering business started by accident. As the story goes, around 1964, an Atlantic City rabbi was putting on an event and asked Rose to cook some kosher European specialties. The guests raved about Rose’s cooking so much that the Zawids were convinced they could do well with a combined catering business and guest house.
Rose and Jack bought a 10-room guest house on Kingston Avenue with a large dining room, and it opened not long after that fateful event with the rabbi’s guests. The home itself was unique. It was four stories high, had 10 guest rooms, a commercial kitchen and a ground-floor dining room.
Rose and Jack stayed in business for 37 years, and eventually garnered a worldwide reputation for singular kosher cooking. Atlantic City, however, was as important to the Zawids as cooking great food.
“For Rose, the Jewish community of Atlantic City was family,” recalled the Zawids’ daughter, Libby Goodman. “She nurtured and nourished it with her great kosher cooking, charity and zest for life.”
Through the years, Rose and Jack catered events, ranging from small gatherings to major parties with hundreds of guests. Rose’s dishes were written about and reviewed positively in The New York Times by food critic Alex Witchell.
“Mrs. Zawid, who is a Holocaust survivor, has a free hand with both salt and sugar, and her love of excess extends to the decor; she has cornered the market on tchotchkes,” Witchell wrote. A late, 1980s piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer was more direct, describing Rose as “The Kosher Queen of Absecon Island.”
It’s been written that Jack and Rose got out of the guest house business around 1991 and concentrated solely on the catering/cooking side of things.
Over the years, they would not let anyone go hungry. The Zawids donated hundreds of holiday meals to the disabled, elderly and infirm. Rose and Jack kept the business going, quite successfully, until a few years before Jack’s passing in 2003.
Upon Rose’s death in 2005, The Press of Atlantic City paid tribute to Rose and to the business.
“For almost 40 years, the restaurant was a cultural meeting place for the local Jewish community and a magnet for Jewish visitors to Atlantic City who desired authentic and properly prepared kosher food,” reported The Press. “Rose’s renown went far beyond Atlantic City, however. She achieved national recognition as a kosher cook. She was truly instrumental in enhancing the charitable and spiritual institutions of the Jewish community.”
Not long after their passing, Libby Goodman established “The Rose and Jack Zawid Memorial Endowed Scholarship” at Stockton University to honor her parents. The award is available to students with a demonstrated interest in the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program.
Others cook brisket, roasted chicken and matzo ball soup, and some of those dishes are pretty good. But they are not Zawids.
