Brooklyn, NY - The City's Kosher Free Soup Kitchen, Where Many Jews Eat

Borough Park, Brooklyn, NY - Masbia, a restaurant-style free soup kitchen, that opened in Borough Park a year ago, is serving the borough's Orthodox Jewish community. Many of them patrons who are single men.

For the rising tide of Jewish poor in Brooklyn, Masbia. Funded almost exclusively by private donations, the kitchen serves Orthodox meals to more than 100 people in a small 14th Ave. storefront five nights a week, its founders said.

Of 1.1 million Jews in New York City, 226,000 were living in poverty in 2002. That is up from 145,000 in 1991, according to the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty. "There is enormous poverty in the Orthodox Jewish community," said Masbia co-founder Alexander Rapaport. "I didn't know how bad it was until we opened."
Seventy percent of the city's poor Jews live in Brooklyn, according to the Council. Orthodox households make up the second largest segment, 27%, of the Jewish poor. Russian Jewish immigrants account for 44%, the council said.

Even with so many hungry people, Rapaport said, Masbia is the only full-service soup kitchen in Brooklyn's vast Orthodox communities. "Jewish families don't go to soup kitchens," said Carol Schneider of the Food Bank for New York City. Poverty, she said, is "considered a stigma."
Jewish families more typically rely on the city system of food pantries - which offer anonymity. The Food Bank provided 354,000 meals to city households over Passover, including 28,000 pounds of gefilte fish.
Rapaport, 28, who earns a living as a publicist, and his partner Mordechai Mandelbaum, 53, opened the kitchen in April 2005 after noticing hungry Orthodox men taking advantage of free snacks at local synagogues.