Yonah Schimmel's Owners Over the Decades

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Jonas “Yonah” Schimmel founded the eponymous bakery sometime around 1910. Hailing from the Austrian province of Galicia, the baker started with a pushcart selling knishes to the throngs of immigrants who flooded the Lower East Side. He opened his first retail shop on Allen Street, and an expansion saw additional stores on Rivington St., Avenue B, and E. Houston St.

Josef Berger married Yonah’s cousin Rose Schimmel in 1903. An immigrant from the village of Bialy-Kamien in the Austrian province of Galicia, Berger went into partnership with Yonah Schimmel at the E. Houston Street store sometime around 1915. Berger had previously operated his own restaurant at 193 Grand St. in Manhattan. He later acquired the knishery and eventually lived above the operation at 144 E. Houston. The store moved to its present location at 137 E. Houston sometime in the 1930s.

  Josef Berger’s son, Arthur, joined the bakery in 1924, and took over the business upon his father’s passing in 1931. Arthur, at one point, opened a second knishery location at 140 Delancey St. (next to the famous Ratner's dairy restaurant) in the Lower East Side.

Lillian Berger (nee Werfel) married Arthur Berger in 1934 and operated the Houston St. location after Arthur’s passing. Sometimes helped by her two sons Harold and Joseph, Lillian opened a Yonah Schimmel’s at 1275 Lexington Ave. in Manhattan's Upper East Side in 1985. In a New York Times blurb about the new store opening, one of the Berger boys was quoted exclaiming: ''In a hundred years on Houston Street, no one's ever asked how many calories there are in a knish. Uptown, we get the question at least five times a day.''

Sheldon Keitz had a short stint as owner in the early to mid-1990s. Keitz, who appears to have used the moniker "Sonny Berger" for media purposes, engaged in gambling operations in Russia. On February 3rd, 1995, FBI agents entered Yonah Schimmel’s searching for Mr. Keitz. According to a New York Times article, Mr. Keitz was sought in connection to a loan-sharking ring, which involved City of New York employees. According to affidavits filed in the case, Keitz was caught on a wiretap saying that he would hold and distribute the collected loan- sharking funds at the knishery. The article to the left is excerpted from a 1993 Newsday column called "Inside New York".

Father and daughter team Alex Wolfson and Ellen Anistratov have owned and operated the knishery since the mid-1990s. Mr. Wolfson, who emigrated from Ukraine in 1979, began working at the bakery as a busboy on his second day in America. According to a 2010 New York Times article, Anistratov is a fashion designer by training, and hopes one of her three sons takes over the family business.