Jewish charity delivers Passover food to more than 200,000 homebound New Yorkers
Ahead of Passover, the Met Council for Jewish Poverty, a New York-based charity, delivered hundreds of thousands of packages of kosher-for-Passover food to senior citizens and others stuck at home because of coronavirus.
With many afraid or unable to leave the house because of coronavirus, or facing financial instability because of coronavirus-related economic slowdown, the Met Council faced unprecedented levels of need this Passover. In a typical year, said Met Council CEO David Greenfield, the nonprofit serves 180,000 people in the month before the holiday. This year, it has provided assistance to 201,000 people in the New York City area.
The Met Council has delivered Passover staples, including 129,000 bottles of grape juice and 1,150,000 of potatoes, onions and apples. But packages also included Jewish delicacies from borscht, gefilte fish, hearts of palm, and pickles.
The Met Council runs the country’s largest network of kosher food pantries and is the world’s largest distributor of free kosher-for-Passover food.
Irene Katz Connelly is an editorial fellow at the Forward. You can contact her at connelly@forward.com.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO