Kosher constant

Segal's, a local institution, turns 30

STEFANIE L. PEARSON
Special to Jewish News

Zalman Segal serves customers in the back of the Thomas Road store in the early 1970s.

Segal's is nothing less than a venerable institution of the Valley Jewish community. In an age when businesses open and close with alarming frequency, Segal's predates the majority of synagogues here.

The sign for the adjacent pizza shop is more noticeable than the one marking Segal's Kosher Foods on Seventh Street in Phoenix.

Lettering on the side of the building identifies it as "Segal's New Place." It's been new since 1984.

That building is the third home for the store, since Zalman and Pearl Segal took over Katz Meat Market, a tiny kosher butcher shop at 512 E. Washington St. in downtown Phoenix.

The market reopened as Segal's on March 13, 1967.

The couple were recruited to take over the market when its then-owner, Ben Mayer, was ready to retire from the business. The Segals and their five children were living in Omaha, Neb., where Zalman Segal had been a shochet, ritual slaughterer.

Was it a shock for the strictly observant family to come to Phoenix then, when the small Jewish community of Phoenix included only a small fraction of Orthodox Jews?

"It was a wonderful, small group of people," Pearl Segal recalls. "And we saw everything grow." Zalman notes there were "barely enough" religious Jews to conduct Orthodox services.

A native-born Israeli and son of a rabbi, Zalman Segal had come to the United States as a child with his family and settled in Chicago. Pearl Segal grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., the daughter of a shochet.

The couple married in 1953 and spent several years in Chicago and then moved on to Omaha. While there, they'd become friendly with Paul and Libby Rosenthal, who subsequently moved to Phoenix.

It was the Rosenthals who thought of the Segals, they say, when the Orthodox community looked for someone to take over Mayer's meat market.

Orthodox Jews follow the dietary laws of kashrut, which specify which types of animals are fit for consumption and which are not. It further requires that the kosher animals (which include most domestic fowl and animals with a split hoof that chew their cud) be slaughtered in accordance with strict requirements. Kosher meat is also soaked and salted to remove blood, and all meat products are kept separate from dairy products.

Unless these laws are followed stringently, Jews who observe kashrut cannot eat meat (as well as a variety of other products that may include non-kosher ingredients). Without a kosher butcher in town, Orthodox Jews would have had to import meat from Los Angeles or Denver, or do without.

"So they thought of us," explains Pearl Segal. The Rosenthals had Rabbi David Rebibo, spiritual leader of Beth Joseph Congregation, call the couple. "He talked us into a trip out here."

The way David Segal, the couple's only son who shares in the management of the store, tells it, Zalman Segal arrived in Phoenix on a bright, sunny February morning in 1967, saw the blue skies, felt the warmth, and was ready to pack the family up and shlep them out from the Midwest.

His parents tell a slightly more complicated version: "We took a weekend vacation out here," Zalman Segal explains, "and they had it all set up - they got all five frum (religious) Jews. We thought we landed in heaven."

"I met with the guy," he continues with a laugh, referring to Mayer, the market owner, "as if I knew what I was looking at."

He returned a month later to reopen the market as his own; Pearl went back to Omaha to sell their house and returned with David and their four daughters just before Passover of that year.

Though she says she fondly remembers the community's warmth and closeness, Phoenix offered observant Jews only limited resources.

The original store - which was located on a plot adjacent to where Civic Plaza now sits - kept a coop of chickens and used to sell freshly slaughtered chickens.

Segal's has maintained a steady business during its three decades here, while other kosher butchers have come and gone. For those who keep kosher, reports Laura Liebhaber, a Phoenix native who ran a kosher restaurant out of Segal's in the early 1990s, shopping there was a "foregone conclusion."

Though the growth of kosher-observant Jews has not necessarily paralleled the growth of the greater Jewish community, the Segals say there's no question that the demand for kosher products has increased tremendously over the years.

Only two years after opening on Washington, the couple moved the store to a larger space at 16th Street and Thomas Road - which Zalman reports was "the only kosher butcher in the country with carpet."

In larger quarters, they provided counter service and hot food, from sandwiches to lamb chop dinners.

David Segal remembers fondly "making deliveries with Elmer Payton from the Thomas Road store" when he was a youngster.

Payton has worked at the store for 29 of its 30 years. "We've aged; he hasn't," says Zalman Segal with a chuckle.

Payton and other long-time employees have helped to create a friendly, familiar atmosphere at the store. It's the kind of place where, more often than not, David or Zalman is sitting behind the register as customers walk in and will call out their names to say hello or playfully tease them.

Jo Fenton, often at the cash register, has worked for Segal's for 14 years. Former employee Fred Salvage spent 18 years there.

"It's a place to go to get the town news, the current events," Liebhaber explains with a laugh. "And David always has a good joke."

David says part of the store's appeal is that it has retained a small-town feeling. "We still maintain a full-service butcher counter," he explains. Customers, he says, have a "counter relationship" with him or Zalman or Elmer and watch them prepare orders. "We could've gone to packaged meats years ago, but we think this is important," he says.

Knowing who's working there is important to customers, David explains. Customers see that either he or Zalman - both strictly observant - is on the premises whenever the store is open, and that can help them feel more confident about the level of kashrut observed.

He says he thinks he and his father are good balances for each other. Zalman, he explains, is "a type-A personality, while I am more laid-back. It must be all the years I spent in California."

All five Segal children were educated at yeshivas, Jewish religious schools - the four girls at Bais Yacov in Denver and David at Yeshiva High School in Los Angeles.

Daughters Lee Weinstein and Rina Pinter now live in New York with their husbands and children, and Sharon Feldstein and her family are in Connecticut.

Daughter Debbie Cooperman runs the store's satellite at the Jewish Quarter of Scottsdale, at Shea Boulevard and Scottsdale Road. Her husband, Rabbi Harris Cooperman, is principal of the Phoenix Hebrew Academy.

Since moving to the Seventh Street location in 1984, Segal's has offered sit-down service.

At its opening in 1984, Zalman envisioned the New Place as a full-time restaurant, serving three meals a day, while the Thomas Road location would continue as a meat and grocery market. But, he explains, there wasn't enough interest in a kosher meat restaurant.

"People would get up and walk out because they couldn't have cream cheese with their bagel," he says. Because the restaurant served meat, it could not serve dairy products.

Eventually, the family closed the Thomas store and consolidated its business with limited restaurant service at the New Place.

Taking a visitor through the back parts of the store, Segal explains that the large walk-in freezer along the north side of the building was originally intended as outdoor seating and a private party area. When he realized the full-service restaurant idea wasn't going to float, he enclosed the space to provide more frozen storage.

Today, Zalman says he views the restaurant as a public service. He says the lack of support from the community frustrates him - it is expensive to run the restaurant, he notes, pointing out that he has to pay a cook and a server whether or not there are customers waiting to be served.

David says he'd love to see another kosher restaurant in town. "It'd be nice to be able to take (his wife) Laurie out to eat and not have to get up to answer the phone," he says.

People don't always understand how much more expensive kosher products are - even wholesale, David Segal explains. Non-kosher corned beef costs other delis in town far less than the kosher corned beef Segal's serves, he says.

There are now other established kosher grocery stores in the Valley serving what the Segals say is a much larger community of people who keep kosher. "It's never been easier," David Segal explains. When the store started, the only prepared kosher foods were "gefilte fish, borscht and gravies. Now, there's everything: Pop-Tarts, Cheeto's-type chips, frozen prepared foods. It's amazing."

Will the store that his father started three decades ago be around for its 60th anniversary? David Segal strokes his beard, pauses, and says, "I'd like to think so."