Toronto’s First Kosher Food Bank Is Closing
It feeds 150 hungry families a week. On Tuesdays, it has about 25 to 30 loyal volunteers prepping meals to hand out about 400 bags of food. And it only costs about $800 a week to run, as Alan Marks, one of Pride of Israel Synagogue’s food banks founders, told CJNews.com.
Donations have shrunk and the two major benefactors of the Pride of Israel food bank are withdrawing their support. One unexpected major benefactor? The Salvation Army. A will of a Jewish man who they had helped find housing declared his last wish to be feeding the needy. The Salvation Army put his remaining assets towards helping the ‘Pride of Israel’ food bank. But money is running out.
14.6% of Canadian Jews live below the poverty line. The cost of keeping kosher is alarmingly high.
“If things continue as they are, I don’t see it continuing,” Marks told CJN.
Shira Feder is a writer. She’s at [email protected]
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