Top Quality Daled Minim are now available locally, with a full selection that includes:
✔️ Esrogei Chazon Ish meyuchasim – with the hadracha of Harav M.Y. Lefkowitz
✔️ Lulavei deri mehudarim
✔️ Itcha’s hadassim
What truly sets Avenue L Esrogim apart is the personal experience. Every customer — no matter their background, minhag, or budget — is treated with respect and honesty. It’s this individualized care, along with uncompromising quality, that has built decades of loyalty and brought customers from across the tri-state area.
As a long-time customer says, “I come all the way from Far Rockaway – I get high quality schoira, I’m treated honestly and like a mentch.”
What to look for in an esrog
Purity matters
When people shop for an esrog, they often focus on its external details — and while those are definitely important, they are not consequential; they won’t make an esrog pasul to use. However, in order for an esrog to be kosher for the use of fulfilling the mitzvah of shaking dalid minim, it should come from a pure, authentic source – it should be a true “thoroughbred.”
Know the source
The first part of an esrog’s authenticity is related to the agricultural process through which it’s grown.
In agriculture, farmers often graft, crossbreed, or join fruit trees to improve the quality, yield, and durability of the fruit the trees produce. However, this process essentially compromises the authenticity of the fruit; it no longer is exactly as it was originally. For example, since farmers often graft apple trees; today, you can’t buy the same exact apples that existed in George Washington’s time, because they have been grafted and crossbred countless times over the years – they are no longer the apples they used to be; they have evolved into something new. Now, that’s fine for an apple, but this grafting process creates a real issue for esrogim, because, as we mentioned, in order to fulfill the mitzva of shaking a kosher esrog, an esrog needs to be from an authentic source, unchanged or grafted over its thousands of years of history. And, since the source of an esrog goes back, not just a few hundred years, but thousands of years – its purity is especially vulnerable, because all it takes is one farmer, in one location, to graft an esrog improperly, and the purity of its strain is damaged forever.
Unfortunately, this scenario of a farmer grafting esrog trees improperly and ruining the purity of its source has played out many times throughout history; some esrogim today come from those very sources, while others, fortunately, come from their original, pure sources and can be used for the mitzva.
This is the first part of an esrog’s authenticity that we need to ensure – that an esrog comes from a source, from an orchard, that bears the approval of a reputable hashgocho who can vouch for the purity of the esrog’s source, and that it was not grafted or crossbred over the years. But that’s not enough – you also need to know that that hashgocho is authentic and not forged, which brings us to the second part of an esrog’s purity.
Ensure it’s authentic
The second crucial aspect of ensuring that the esrog we shake is authentic is the chain of custody. Even if an esrog is said to be from a source, from an orchard, that has a reputable hashgocho, there are often many middlemen involved in bringing an esrog to the market. There are farmers, suppliers, shippers etc. The long chain of hands that an esrog goes through on its journey from the orchard until it reaches the market, leaves room for a lot to go wrong. In fact, an orchard with a good hashgocho that ensures its agricultural purity, could ship out 10k esrogim worldwide, and in reality, nobody would know if there were 50k sold in its name across the globe – it’s impossible to know. Using a computer, anyone can forge the source of an esrog easily; they just need to mimic the graphics on the orchard’s original boxes. This is actually very enticing to people who are dishonest, because they can get esrogim from non-reputable orchards for just a few dollars, repackage them as if they were from a reputable orchard, and then sell them. In fact, they can even take a cheap esrog and repackage it to look like it’s from any reputable source a customer might want.
Unfortunately, this has happened many times over the years, and is very relevant today – anyone can print anything they want on a box. Over the years, I’ve personally been approached by suppliers looking for business, offering to get me “whatever I wanted” for just a few dollars. That in itself shows that these suppliers were not dealing with reliable sources at all. They were simply repackaging the merchandise to match whatever the customer claimed they wanted. What’s scary is that some of these repackaged “esrogim” really look perfect; it’s nearly impossible to see the difference between the original boxes and the imitations. A Rov once showed me boxes with basic spelling mistakes on the hashgocho itself – a telltale sign that there was no real Rov or reputable source behind it, it was simply a cheap imitation, which that Rov was lucky enough to notice, but there were others who did not notice the fine print on the hashgocho, and it otherwise looked like a very good imitation of the authentic source.
Similarly, a few years ago, there was a supplier in New York who was caught selling merchandise packaged as if it was coming from a very reputable source, when, in fact, it was coming from somewhere else entirely – a non-authentic source; but, again, it was very hard to see that from the packaging, they really looked almost identical to the ones they were trying to mimic!
It’s also important to note that, often, a seller can be an honest, trustworthy person but is himself unaware of the middlemen involved in bringing the esrogim to market – he himself can be fooled into buying something non-authentic, thinking that it is authentic and pure.
That’s why it is not enough to trust what’s printed on the packaging of an esrog; but, a person needs to ensure that the seller is trustworthy, knows which orchard the esrogim originated from and verifies that that’s the true source for what he’s selling.
This – the purity and authenticity of an esrog is the most important part of looking for an esrog. You want to ensure that the esrog comes from a reliable source: from a meyuchas’dige orchard, and that it is being sold by honest people who really know how it got from the orchard to the market.
To stop by Avenue L Esrogim Center or for more information
📍 Location: 26 Youmans Dr. Spring Valley
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tel:+18454288331
This Yom Tov, bring home your mehudar Daled Minim with the reliability, care, and experience that has been trusted for 31 years!
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