Lender’s Bagels

724 Grand Avenue (former)

Murray (right) and Adam Lender in the Grand Avenue bakery. Photo courtesy the Lender Family.

Harry Lender was born in Siedliszcze in eastern Poland in 1894. He learned to bake as a baker’s apprentice in Lublin, Poland, where he met and married his wife Rose and started his family. When anti-Semitism made life dangerous, he followed his older brothers to New York in 1926. He worked for a bagel shop in New Jersey until 1927, when he bought a small shop (about 800 square feet) on New Haven’s Oak Street, which he named The New York Bagel Company since he made New York-style bagels. He then sent for his wife, two sons, and daughter. In 1935, Lender bought a two-family house with a 1,200-square-foot garage, the former home of the Regna Italian Bread Bakery, on nearby Baldwin Street in the Hill. His sons Hymie, Sam, and Murray helped him there for 30 years, introducing modern production methods such as freezing the product, using a large rotary oven, and baking many varieties of bagels. As the business grew, Harry and Rose continued to be known for their generosity and always maintained the practice of supplying free bagels to community events and people in need.

When Harry died in 1960, his sons Marvin, the operations manager, and Murray, the marketing manager, took over the business. As they expanded their clientele to include supermarkets across the country, they needed more modern production space and bought a 12,000-square-foot facility in West Haven in 1965, which they expanded into 25,000 square feet, naming it the Lender’s Bagel Bakery. Needing still more production space, in 1975 they bought an even larger facility at 724 Grand Avenue in New Haven that formerly housed the Olmer Brothers Bakery. By 1984, the Lenders had four bagel factories producing more than 750 million bagels a year. In 1984 they sold the business to Kraft. According to Marvin, “There were four or five companies, including Sara Lee, that wanted to buy us. There was a bidding war.” Marvin and Murray continued working in their respective roles for two more years before retiring and devoting their time and financial resources to many philanthropic projects which have benefited both the Jewish and non-Jewish community. Lyman Orchards acquired the property in December 2021 with plans to relocate their fruit pie-baking operations to New Haven.

Text sources: Horowitz, Andy, “The Lender Family of New Haven”, Jews in New Haven, Vol. IX, Edited by David S. Fischer, M.D., pp. 191-219; Turmelle, Luther, “Lender’s factory History,” New Haven Register, March 1, 2000; Caplan, Colin M., Lender’s Bagel History, a Zoom presentation for the Jewish Historical Society of Greater New Haven, March 7, 2021; Interview with Marvin Lender conducted by Rhoda Zahler Samuel.