Sunday, November 10, 2002 - Kislev 5, 5763

That's how the cookie crumbles / By Orly Halpern

The family business has moved from the living room to a laundry room, and that's what the family calls success. At least the four kids can watch television again.

Gail and David Ehrlich immigrated to Israel from Queens, New York, in 1980 and live in Efrat settlement between Jerusalem and Hebron. This month is the first anniversary of their always promising but sometimes vexing cookie factory.

At the new premises - the converted laundry room of the neighboring settlement of Ein Tzurim - Gail and three workers work steadily. One of them is her son Noam who is awaiting his army draft. Gail, dressed in an oversized T-shirt partially covered by an apron, a long green skirt, and sneakers, is both focused and multi-tasking. While preparing batter she simultaneously gives the other three helpers instructions: "Yeah, add the eggs now." It's midday and she has already completed two batches of 50 kilos.

Last fall Gail, whose confectionary talents were already renowned in Efrat, was asked if she could bake cookies to be sold to a 400-strong all-women audience during the intermission of a women's play staged by the Raise Your Spirits Theater Company.

"Times were tough; I was getting scared," says David, who as a producer of PR films for hi-tech companies, was the main breadwinner. "When that industry crashed, I basically didn't know what I was going to do. I needed to pay the mortgage, put food on the table." Gail accepted the theater offer, although she had only three days to bake 1,000 cookies. "I was up day and night."

The play was a big hit - planned for three performances, it ran to midnight - and so were the cookies. "People kept asking for more," Gail recalls. She baked in the kitchen, but the cookies started taking over the adjacent living room. David and the kids would package them and put computer-designed stickers on the bags.

The director then asked if Gail could make seventy loaf cakes, one for each member of the cast. "I could fit seven cakes at a time in the oven. Every hour I was taking them out and putting in seven more." One day, her husband was looking at the stacks of cookie boxes in the living room before a show, and he realized - "We're in business." At that point the two made their first strategic investment, a 5-shelf industrial oven.

Gili's goodies

It was about that time that Gail started to have health problems. "I was getting heart palpitations in the morning, wondering how was I going to do two jobs," she says. A family photo shows "Gili," as David calls her, smiling somewhat guiltily and holding bottles and bottles of vitamins and medicines. "We called them 'Gili's goodies,'" he says with a laugh.

She promptly quit her pre-school teaching job to devote herself entirely to the new family business. On November 29th, 2001, 'Gili's Cookies' went on sale in stores in Jerusalem.

"Every step was scary," says David, recalling his initial anxieties, "especially when we were buying the equipment." An old friend from the United States who also lives in Efrat gave the Ehrlichs a generous interest-free loan of "tens of thousands of dollars" to enable them to buy the oven, a 40-liter industrial mixer, and a large freezer.

David's film production van was converted to a cookie-mobile that distributed the cookies from their living room to Jerusalem, Beit Shemesh and Mevasseret Tzion. Then last August, the expansion process made it's biggest move - literally - when the factory moved out of the living room into Ein Tzurim.

"Before we moved it was crazy," says Gail from the spacious new quarters. "You walked into the entrance of the house and there was the freezer and all the empty boxes. The dining room had the mixer, the kitchen had the industrial oven and the den was the ingredients storeroom. By Tuesday night the floor would be covered with boxes - each Wednesday is delivery day."

Ein Tzurim was a kibbutz that "is presently being privatized, so they don't need the laundry room anymore," says David. The large wooden cubby holes for holding the clothes of the different families are now storage for packed cookies.

It's only Sunday, so the shelves are almost empty. A new cookie-cutting machine will arrive later in the day along with an 80-liter mixer. Large sacks of flour and granola are stacked in a corner of the spacious and cheerily painted room. A dough stretcher stands on the other side, next to the 14-shelf oven that replaced the 5-shelf one.

A schedule posted on the refrigerator (its handle covered in chocolatey smudges) lists who is working when, and what cookies are baked that day. A fridge magnet says: 'I'd give up chocolate, but I'm no quitter' - and the whiff of chocolate wafting through the room is intoxicating.

Krinkle it

The small group of laborers produces 300 kilos of cookies a week, along with brownies and 'krinkles', the most popular item. Loaf cakes are made by special order and Gail is preparing 50 for a bar mitzvah in Ra'anana this week. The move out of the den has also allowed the family to get a badatz kosher approval and Gili's Cookies are now kosher by mehadrin.

David hopes Gili's Cookies will be exported one day. "People abroad have expressed an interest," he says, "in particular because of the new internet site (www.gilisgoodies.com). Families abroad now order cookies and cakes for their kids who are studying in yeshivas here. The web business is really growing."

The possibility of their confectionaries being boycotted because they come from the occupied territories does not faze David: "If you ask me, the spirit of supporting Israel in the States would make the business boom."

The cookies require David to travel daily on the sometimes dangerous road between the Gush Etzion settlement bloc and Jerusalem. "When you live out here you have no choice. You've gotta have faith to travel these roads daily - I guess you can say these are faithful cookies. I'm not a political guy. We originally moved out here (Efrat) because it's so beautiful and the quality of life great, not because we're right-wing fanatics. But, I'd say that now that we're here our ideology has strengthened and we wouldn't leave, despite the danger, especially in this period."

David has just returned from a trip to Jerusalem. "Gail is in, I'm out," says David, explaining the working plan of the company. "Gail does the baking, I do the business, marketing and distribution." And the talking.

As different as their jobs are, so are their personalities. David, about the same height as his wife is disheveled and friendly, happy to talk about his new business. Gail, tall, thin and serious, is quiet, modest and self-effacing and happy to let David do the PR.

She looks a bit tired and not a little annoyed. The plastic boxes for packing the cookies ran out this morning, forcing her to add one more step before the packing process until David brought more. "I'm a perfectionist and I'm fast. We're completely opposite - but, we're a team. If he doesn't do his part, I can't do mine, and vice versa. Then we have to go home and live with each other," she says. "But we both want the same things," says David. "Pay off the house, marry off our kids, and have some money in the bank."

"Hey, not so fast!" yells 19-year-old Noam from the kitchen sink.

When asked how he defines success, David doesn't hesitate: "Success for me is getting Gail out of the kitchen."

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