Getting Hit in the Matzah Basket

Met Council CEO David Greenfield

By Reuvain Borchardt

David Greenfield, CEO of the Met Council on Jewish Poverty, discusses the effect of soaring food costs on families in our communities this Pesach.

Every year at the Seder, we ask, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” For many families, this Pesach will be different from other Pesachs because of the price of food. What can you tell us about the difference in the cost of food this year?

It’s devastating. That’s the short answer.

It’s a devastating year for tens of thousands of families in our community. I’ve never seen such a significant jump in the cost of food. Keep in mind that in New York City, unemployment is still twice as high as it is in the rest of the country.

There are many people in our community who have lost jobs. Their expenses overall are going up: gas, electric, heating. And now they have a triple whammy, with the food.

Pesach food is always very expensive. But now it is pushed up further due to inflation, resulting in a devastating Pesach for thousands of families in our community.

And there’s a big disconnect between the haves and the have-nots. Baruch Hashem, there are thousands of families in our community who are spending Pesach in five-star resorts around the world and for whom money is not an object. They’re dropping $50,000, $75,000, or $100,000-plus on their families for Yom Tov. And then you have thousands of families who are struggling like they’ve never struggled before in their lives to make Pesach. It’s stark.

Can you give us some examples of specific food staples, and their price increases?

On average, gefilte fish is up 21% this year, compared with last Pesach. Matzah is up 23%. Cooking oil is up 38%. Potato starch is up 34%. Eggs are up 37%. Beef, depending on the hashgachah, is up between 40% and 50%.

These are the basic staples that families survive on during Pesach, and you’re looking at some unbelievable price increases, resulting from a bunch of different factors that are all coming together at the same time to squeeze the working-class in our community. 

The first factor is general inflation. During the pandemic, the government literally printed and gave out money for free. What happened — and it was predictable — is that that led to general inflation.

The second challenge is that the cost of gas that is used in automobiles and trucks, including diesel, has gone up significantly. Most of the goods coming into New York City come in by truck. And when the cost of gas and diesel go up, the cost of delivering the food goes up.

Finally, the biggest wild card, which we just haven’t seen before, is the war in Ukraine, which, believe it or not, is causing a lot of pressure. A lot of the matzahproduction in the world actually took place in Ukraine, which had one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe. For example, MHP SE is one of the largest food producers in Europe. They’re based in Ukraine and no longer supplying grains and chicken feed and actual chicken abroad because they have to feed the Ukrainian army. That single company has caused pressure on the costs of a whole variety of items.

This combination of factors has really been causing this major increase, particularly in the price of kosher food, which is already inflated during Pesach.

David Greenfield, Assemblyman Simcha Eichenstein, Councilman Kalman Yeger and Community Board Chair Yidel Perlstein fill the back of a minivan full of kosher-for- Pesach food in Boro Park. (File)

What about the sanctions on Russia — are those affecting kosher food prices?

Yes! The sanctions on Russia, while well-deserved for their illegal and immoral war, are limiting Russian goods in the market. The most obvious way is that Russian sanctions have been affecting the cost of gas, which is affecting the price of kosher food as well, due to higher delivery costs.

How is all of this affecting Met Council’s pre-Pesach distribution this year?

Met Council runs the world’s largest free kosher-for-Pesach food distribution. This year we will be giving out, im yirtzeh Hashem, 2.7 million pounds of food at 190 different locations, that will feed over 300,000 people in need.

We start this process around Chanukah time, which is necessary when procuring this amount of food.

The challenge that we’ve been facing has been that a lot of the product that we ordered is just not available. We got cancellations on chickens, eggs and produce. The short supply has not only driven up the costs, it has actually made it difficult to fill the orders.

You might have seen a few weeks ago that a few of the kosher fast-food restaurants shut down because they couldn’t get chicken. No matter how much you wanted to pay, there just was no chicken. Those kinds of challenges are significant for us, but we improvise. So, for example, when we couldn’t get chicken, we purchased fish instead. We’re constantly scrambling to try to make sure that we can do what we’ve intended to do, which is provide 2.7 million pounds of food to Jews in need for Pesach.

But the bigger challenge for us has been that our costs have gone up. Even though we lock in most of our costs in December and January, some of the costs get passed on, and our overall costs for Pesach this year have gone up by approximately $1.9 million over last year, from nearly $8 million last year to nearly $10 million this year. So we are now scrambling to raise more money than ever before.

Keep in mind that Met Council runs the largest kosher food network in America all year round. Every week, we’re pushing out food to over 100 locations, on average half a million pounds of food a week. For Pesach, we’re doing over five times as much as we would be doing on a typical week.

Pesach is a tough Yom Tov for astruggling family — they can’t just eat cereal and milk on Pesach. You have to have a Seder, and a meal, and matzos. Matzah is a product that is already insanely expensive: you can buy two loaves of challah for a typical Shabbos or Yom Tov for less than one-quarter the price of a pound of shemurah matzah.

A volunteer moves mounds of onions in Williamsburg to be distributed before Pesach. (File)

In addition to the higher prices, is Met Council feeding more families than last year?

We think we’re going to end up feeding approximately 10% more people than last year.

Most of our food goes through other “pantries,” like Tomchei Shabbos, the Flatbush Fund Sephardic Bikur Holim and UJO of Williamsburg, which get the bulk of their kosher-for-Pesach food from us.

We do operate 15 of our own pantries in communities that don’t have as much communal infrastructure, in places like Canarsie, Coney Island and parts of the Bronx and Queens.

And we have a separate program where we deliver to 2,150 Holocaust survivors directly to their homes before Pesach. That’s 100% privately funded. It’s a brand new program we started during the pandemic, and its one of the things I’m proudest of — making sure survivors live with dignity.

What percentage of Met Council’s budget is covered by government, and what percentage do you have to raise?

In a regular year, the budget that we get from the government covers approximately 50% of our costs. In the government systems right now, there is an inherent bias against kosher food. We’ve been making the case for the last couple of years to the government that they need to change the equation of their cheshbon in terms of how they decide who gets what, because most of the government products that are given out are non-kosher. People don’t know that the government free food programs are not based on trying to get the best food for people who need it, but are based on the concept that farmers have extra food, and they’re trying to get rid of their extra food, so they’re giving their leftovers to people who are in need. So it’s not driven around the people who need the food; it’s driven around the farmers.

New York has a program called Nourish New York. We helped start the program, because food pantries were in desperate straits during the pandemic. We worked with the Assembly Speaker, the Senate Majority Leader and the then-Governor to establish this program. But even that program is really based on the products that farmers have and they’re trying to push out. So what ends up happening is that the most popular products, as you can imagine, traditionally are not kosher. For example, for many months of the year, pork and beans is one of the most available products across the country, but that’s worthless to us. Or fish that’s non-kosher.

So in general, the government only covers 50% of our food budget. We have to raise the money for the rest of it. This year, we had an emergency fundraiser to raise money just to make up for the inflation, because we already had it budgeted, but, like I said, we needed to raise nearly $1.9 million more than last year. We’re close to hopefully getting that done over the days ahead. But at the end of the day, failure is not an option. We can’t just give people who are expecting food, less food. So no matter what it takes, we are going to get the job done. And if we have to borrow the money, we will, and we’ll raise and repay it in the future.

But in general, the system as it relates to free food from the government for the kosher community is broken. And we’ve been making the case in Albany and in Washington that we need that system to change to be more reflective of kosher populations. Because it doesn’t help us to get franks and beans for dinner from Campbell’s.

Then-Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams joins David Greenfield and Yitzy Weinberg at a pre-Yom Tov distribution with the Met Council and Flatbush Community Fund. (File)

Speaking of government food programs: I understand that New York City was actually delivering very large amounts of produce in recent months — which I believe may have been funded by the federal government — and it recently cut it off abruptly. Is that correct?

Yes. We were one of the biggest losers. We ended up losing approximately a half-million dollars of produce. It’s still not clear as to why that program stopped so suddenly. But it was a very significant challenge for us.

You mentioned unemployment as being a big factor in the level of neediness. Are most of the families you help unemployed? Or are there families with two working parents who just can’t make ends meet?

I would say that it’s really a combination. We have people who are recently unemployed in bigger numbers than ever before, and that’s been driving the increase. But every year, we see families where people are working, and they’re just not making enough to make ends meet for Pesach, and we proudly support them as well, because we understand that the struggle is real.

And there are folks whom, it could be that they’re immigrants that come from the former Soviet Union, and they’re older folks, or they’re disabled, and they’re just not able to work.

So it’s combination of three different things: there are people who can’t work, there are people who want to work but are not finding jobs,  and then there are people who are working, but they’re just not making ends meet.

This is definitely going to be an incredibly challenging Pesach. And I would encourage families who are in fact able, baruch Hashem, to enjoy a Pesach at a resort to double their maos chitim this year. That would be my advice to families who are reading this as they prepare to go to a hotel in Mexico or Spain or Eretz Yisrael. If they want to make a difference, let them give twice as much. And certainly, you’re welcome to give to us. But I’m very happy if people give to other tzedakos, like their local shul or Rav doing a maos chitim campaign.

And by the way, they can donate for the regular weekly campaigns as well — this goes for the food that we’re giving to the Tomchei Shabbosos of the world that have been really struggling. I’ll give you an example. A few weeks ago, we got a call from Tomchei Shabbos in Queens. They give chicken for Shabbos every week, but they could not get the product that they needed. It wasn’t a cost issue; there simply was no supply. We had a stockpile of chicken that we had planned on giving out before Pesach — and we gave them our chicken, knowing that we had the ability to get more of it, because more was coming in to us before Pesach. So that Shabbos, Tomchei Shabbos of Queens was able to distribute chicken to hundreds of families.

Back to Pesach: This is the most family-oriented Yom Tov of the year. And the centrality of food around Pesach is really more so than any other Yom Tov. Literally from the wine to the matzos, to the charoses, to the maror — the Yom Tov revolves around food. And I think that’s what makes it so important to make sure that everyone has what they need to eat on Pesach.

rborchardt@hamodia.com

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