The Penso family emigrated from Turkey in the 1940s and settled in Jerusalem. There, in the Mahane Yehuda market, Yeshayahu Penso opened a small bakery offering Turkish bourekas that reminded him of home. In the 1950s, when the family moved to Bat Yam, they relocated their bourekas shop to the Levinsky Market, a bustling hub for Balkan immigrants that bustled back then with vegetable stalls and carts selling prepared food. The Penso family sold bourekas along with ayran, a salty Turkish yogurt drink, from one of these carts. Over the years, as the market evolved, the cart turned into a shop. The second (Moshe) and third (Yeshayahu) generations of the Penso family joined the business, and today, you can find various types of phyllo dough or puff pastry bourekas, kadaifi noodles, baklava, and, by special order, sütlaç (rice pudding) and ashure (a pudding made with wheatberries and dried fruit).

Photo: Noam Prisman

“Bourekas are part of a world that is disappearing,” says food writer Rotem Maimon. “Trans fats, the perception of bourekas as a cheap snack served at government meetings, and the increasing prevalence of frozen products have not done it any favors. As a result, the bourekas of the past are vanishing — who wants to toil in the middle of the night to create thin sheets of pastry? Certainly not the younger generation, who have realized that money can be made faster with other products.

Time seems to have stopped at Penso. They are not trying to reinvent the wheel, nor are they aiming to be a café; they simply continue to make the same pastries, based on a recipe that has proven itself for more than 70 years. The baking is still done by hand, and the fillings are spot on, providing comfort for the soul when it longs for a giant spiral pastry.”