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Masbia is a not-for-profit charity organization that was founded in April 2005 with one goal in mind – no one should go to sleep hungry, even if they could not afford a meal that day. In 2009, after the great recession, Masbia opened more locations. The expansion was even mentioned on Saturday Night Live. Masbia was actually featured in People Magazine in 2014 as a “restaurant without a cash register”.
After a couple of years, Masbia staff started giving people raw food to take home. It quickly turned into a weekly food package distribution that now dwarfs in volume the amount of food served at the restaurant. Now Masbia operates two programs, one known as Soup-Kitchen, where people are served ready-to-eat dinners, and the other as Food-Pantry, where people receive raw food ingredient packages to take with them.
A few hundred families visit Masbia every day at each of our three locations. That means about 1,000 families a day and 5,000 families a week get food relief from Masbia. In addition to people visiting Masbia to get services, Masbia is venturing to do deliveries with the support of DoorDash. Masbia also activates a relief squad that responds to emergencies beyond the existing neighborhoods we operate in.
Masbia is a grass-roots, hand-to-mouth organization where every dollar donated makes it into someone’s stomach in less than two weeks. Everything that is done at Masbia is done only because tens of thousands of people like you come together and share resources to make it happen.
In Short: Masbia Soup Kitchen Network provides emergency food to people in need due to financial status or because of natural disasters via ready-to-eat nutritious meals and raw groceries, free of charge.
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Masbia Soup Kitchen Network’s emergency food programs serve over 2 million meals a year in two main categories. We serve roughly 100,000 hot, sit-down dinners to clients at our restaurant like soup kitchens, and the rest in emergency care packages with the equivalent of 9 meals worth of groceries for every member of the family.
Masbia goes to great lengths to provide nutritious food to our clients, including as much fresh produce as possible. The meal, which is served by volunteer waiters, includes a starter salad, beverage, soup, a protein (like chicken or fish), two hot side dishes, and dessert. We place great emphasis on serving our clients with dignity and respect, seen both in the food we serve and in the restaurant-like setting in which it is served. Providing these meals requires immense resources including a full-time kitchen and chef, hundreds of weekly volunteers to prepare food, greet the guests and serve the clients. Our hot dinner service caters to the old and frail, the homeless, and people who are in a crises situation with no means to cook for themselves. We serve roughly 2,000 hot dinners each week out of our three locations.
The gold standard of an emergency food package is to include enough food for three meals for three days for every member of the family. We model our packages on the MyPlate meal size recommendations, which include grains, fruits and vegetables, and protein. The package size varies relative to family size (see our guide on the right for how we create the packages). The packages cater more to women and children who have a home to cook in but have no means to buy raw ingredients.
We try our best to provide our clients with fresh food, versus canned or processed food. Masbia goes out of its way to procure fresh produce, including picking it up from local farmers’ markets. Protein can be as cheap as peanut butter and beans, or as expensive as chicken or beef. Trying to give our clients a dignified balance is our ongoing challenge. On the one hand, we try to be true to our donors’ money by getting the most volume for their dollars, and on the other hand, we try to be true to our donors’ wishes by giving clients high-quality foods. Not only do we stretch our donors’ dollars, but we also cherish your dollars by constantly pursuing large quantities of donated food to put in the packages.
In order to create the packages we distribute, we require close to 50,000 pounds of food each week. The sheer volume of food that comes in and out on a weekly basis takes an enormous toll on our staff, volunteers, facilities, and equipment. The receiving and the packaging rely heavily on volunteers. Close to 100,000 volunteer hours are clocked at our network every year. We distribute roughly 40,000 meals a week in our emergency food package distribution. The packages tend to cater more to women and children who have a home to cook in but have no means to buy raw ingredients.
For $10 you can sponsor a hot meal and for $54 you can sponsor a family food package. Our donation page has various combinations of sponsorship that are multiples of $10/$54. You can also choose to sponsor by the day for $5,000, by the week for $30,000, or month for $118,000 and we will post your sponsorship on the walls of our dining rooms during a time of your choosing. Your donation will have an immediate impact. It will be converted into food in less than one week and distributed to clients in less than two weeks. It will also have a direct impact on the quality of food we are able to distribute as mentioned above.
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Masbia started as a grassroots charity to feed the hungry. It began as a simple vision shared by Mordechai Mandelbaum and Alexander Rapaport, a vision of a clean, well-lit and attractive place where poor men, women, and children could eat nourishing kosher meals daily for free. These two men set out to make this vision a reality, and on Sunday, April 3, 2005, Masbia — Brooklyn’s first and only kosher soup kitchen — opened its doors to the public.
Over the past eleven years since its opening, Masbia has served millions meals, which means tens of thousands of people (many of them children and elderly) have gone to bed with food in their stomachs, full and content. In the quest to tackle hunger, Masbia is the organization that will always do as much as is possible… and then strive to do even more.
In 2009, Masbia experienced several major expansions to its operations. From 2009 to 2010, Masbia opened three new sites — one in Flatbush, one in Williamsburg (now closed), and one in Rego Park, Queens — in addition to the original site in Boro Park.
Masbia also has developed recently two new exciting initiatives. Masbia actively networks with local NY farmers and CSA programs in order to get fresh and local produce donations. This year, Masbia established its Weekend Take-Home Package program at all three soup kitchen sites. Through this program alone, Masbia has gives out over 1,000 variously-portioned packages of food each week.
This past year has been an incredible time of growth for our organization. So far every year, Masbia continues to grow and serve at least 20% more meals than the previous year, currently distributing over 2,000,000 meals a year. Though Masbia’s vision has evolved in its scope and range, all these aims are inspired and initiated by Masbia’s original mission statement: “To provide hot, nutritious meals to the needy free of charge.” For more information, please email info@masbia.org.
Masbia is the only kosher-certified soup kitchen in America that is open to the public daily. Not only are daily dinners certified by the Orthodox Union (OU), the world’s largest and most widely recognized kosher certification agency, but everything we give out at our food pantry is certified by them as well. Since we receive a lot of donated food items and federal commodities which don’t have a hashgacha (aka kashrut symbol) on the packaging, we found it necessary to have a blanket certification of our entire inventory of emergency food. Not only do we try to give our people the best food with the utmost dignity, but we also give them a high standard of kashrut, thus the OU is our certifying agency. (Some of our facilities might have an additional local certification based on what is popular in that neighborhood). All hot food served in our restaurant-style soup kitchen is glatt kosher, done with hashgacha temidis, uses vegetables that have been checked for bugs, and is pas Yisroel.
While religious teachings are replete with obligations of charity – stemming mainly from the biblical obligation of maaser, or tithing – charity has become so ingrained in Judaism that it is both a cultural and a religious act. One reason for this is that charity, or sharing with the needy, is considered the most basic kind of mitzvah a person can do. There is no second-guessing an act of caring; regardless of your intentions or the size of your charity, if you share with a person in need, you have performed a mitzvah. Additionally, tzedakah, unlike most other mitzvot, is not time-sensitive; it can be done at any time.
There is a popular Jewish teaching, “Mitzvah goreret mitzvah,” which originates in Masechet Avot and means “one mitzvah leads to another.” Culturally, Jews have always sought a starter mitzvah to begin a chain of good deeds, and because tzedakah was so flexible and achievable, it became the go-to starter mitzvah. Since time immemorial, women bringing in Shabbos began by giving charity, and men started their day by giving tzedakah before they prayed.
Hundreds of years before the internet or money wires, the concept of the “pushka” was born. The pushka, a locked canister traditionally mounted in Jewish homes and synagogues, was designed as an instant charity mechanism. People could put money in it at any time, and it was periodically collected by a designated neighborhood collector to give to the poor. With the pushkas, Jews of all means, even the poor, became accustomed to giving charity daily, if not more than once a day. This resulted in a culture of daily giving and attention to tzedakah. Today, this tradition continues even in pre-school classes, where children start the day by putting coins in their classroom tzedakah box.
When Jews moved out of the shtetl and into the cities, largely due to the Holocaust, the pushka became an item issued by charity organizations, and households began having multiple pushkas in their homes
This has been made easier with modern technology, such as online donation pages where you can simply click “DONATE.” It’s instant, virtual, automatic, and doesn’t take up room in your house. Now, more than ever, we can perform an instant mitzvah.
Donations to Masbia, a non-profit charity organization, are immediate in a profoundly meaningful way. Every donation to Masbia is converted into food, and because Masbia is a grassroots organization, that food finds its way into a hungry person’s stomach in less than two weeks. So your mitzvah has even more immediacy.
Traditionally, a Jewish community throughout the diaspora could not be formed without a dedicated charity division. In most places, this meant a collection and distribution service of ready-to-eat food, i.e., a food pantry and/or a soup kitchen. Masbia strives to be the current-day version of that, serving daily hot meals and weekly emergency food packages to people in need from multiple locations in various Jewish communities.
Jewish teaching specifies that charity should be done in a high-end manner, meaning that one should choose to give the best quality to those in need, be it food, clothing, or materials for a house of worship. Masbia’s mission is to live up to this by providing the hungry men, women, and children we serve with the best quality, nutritious, and kosher meals in a beautiful setting.
Jewish teaching also emphasizes the importance of the table in doing charity. The Talmud explains that the act of hosting guests is rewarded with longevity because it is the equivalent of bringing a sacrifice on the altar in the times of the Holy Temple. The Talmud specifies that it is a “person’s table that brings them atonement,” establishing the table itself as a vessel of forgiveness. When one sponsors food at Masbia, the tables the food is served on become your table from which you are sharing food, earning the full blessing of the Talmud.
The Talmud also makes it clear that providing ready-to-eat food is the highest form of charity because the satisfaction to the hungry person is immediate (mekarve ahaneise). At Masbia, our hot dinner program does exactly that – it feeds hungry men, women, and children hot, nutritious, ready-to-eat meals.
Masbia has gained a reputation for the incredible dignity we provide in our hot dinner service, dubbed by People Magazine as “a restaurant without a cash register.” Since opening in 2005, Masbia has been featured in many prominent American media outlets, including People Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, New York Daily News, CBS News, ABC News, Pix11, NY1, and News12.
