An “emergency” shipment of matzah for Passover has arrived in Halifax just days after the Atlantic Jewish Council declared a city-wide matzah emergency.
And organizer Rabbi Yakov Kerzner was on duty on April 2, at his Beth Israel Synagogue on Oxford Street to distribute the 150 pounds of matzahs which he hastily ordered earlier this week from Montreal.
The unleavened bread—needed to observe the biblical Jewish commandment of eating matzah on the first night of Passover —arrived in Halifax on Thursday. Passover begins at sundown on April 5.
“There was literally no matzah in town,” Rabbi Kerzner told The CJN Daily in an interview on March 30.
The prior weekend, Rabbi Kerzner went to check on the supplies of Passover products in stock at the two main grocery stores in Halifax whose managers had submitted orders long ago, after consulting closely with the Jewish community. At the Sobeys outlet on Queen Street, the rabbi found plenty of jars of Gefen pasta sauce, some kosher cold cuts, soup mandlen, and one box of Streit’s egg matzah.
Over at the Atlantic Superstore on Joseph Howe Drive, it was more plentiful, with Streit’s matzah farfel boxes, Gefen mayonnaise and coffee cake mix, but only five boxes of plain matzah, and a dozen boxes of egg matzah.
“And I said, ‘There’s a lot of people who didn’t buy in advance and go in the last week, we probably have to do something,’” Rabbi Kerzner explained.
Traditionally, Ashkenazi Jews must eat only plain matzah or shemurah matzah made of flour and water at the seder in order to fulfil the requirement for eating the bread of affliction. (Egg matzah is made with eggs, flour and apple cider or fruit juice, so it doesn’t qualify—although it can be eaten by the elderly, the sick and the young.)
Several days ago, Rabbi Kerzner contacted the head of the Atlantic Jewish Council, Yoram Abisror, and they scrambled to take the unprecedented action of issuing a special community-wide email blast to the entire Jewish community in the Atlantic region.
The matzah shortage doesn’t just impact Halifax’s Jewish community. Jewish families in smaller Atlantic centres (such as on Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland) have to source their matzah in Halifax or make other sometimes costlier arrangements, including ordering on Amazon.
Although he is not urging people to do their shopping that way, during the pandemic two years ago, Rabbi Kerzner himself resorted to ordering shemurah matzah online.
“So, you could buy a lot of products, probably, on Amazon. There is more available but at a price.”
“Matzah shortage in Halifax store” the Atlantic Jewish Council’s notice read.
In it, Rabbi Kerzner announced he would take pre-orders for Jerusalem brand matzahs at $5 per pound, sourced from Montreal. Once it arrived, customers would be able to pick up individual bags of matzah from him at the shul, hopefully by Sunday afternoon.
Whether it was a Passover miracle, or just speedy action by the rabbi, the shipment arrived in Halifax on Thursday.
Sourcing the necessary kosher foods for Jewish holidays is always a challenge in smaller communities. But this year, in Halifax, it has been particularly hard, officials said.
“I’ve been here for a number of years and over the years, the supply seems to be getting shorter and shorter and less predictable,” said Rabbi Kerzner, who left Toronto to take the job as spiritual leader in Halifax’s Orthodox synagogue in 2016. “Some of that had to do with COVID, but in general, the supply chain is not working so well for us on the outer limits of the Jewish communities in Canada.”
Despite multiple meetings with the managers of the Sobeys and Atlantic Superstore to prepare for Jewish festivals, officials say the orders either come two to three weeks late, or they arrive with large quantities of products missing.
Sometimes, according to Yoram Abisror of the Atlantic Jewish Council, the stores get products from Israel that are kosher mixed in with items that are not kosher for Passover.
After spending years working in Jewish communal organizations in other parts of Canada and Israel, Abisror remains shocked at the challenges facing Jews in Atlantic Canada.
“I just came here from Montreal,” he said. “And seeing what we have in Montreal and just before Passover in the different supermarkets compared to what we have here, it’s not only that we’re lacking stuff, it’s the quantity, and as for the stuff itself, some of the things don’t come here at all.”
Neither Abisror nor Rabbi Kerzner faulted the local managers at the supermarkets for this year’s scarcity. But turnover of staff means the new crew may not have the same understanding of the Jewish community’s needs. Officials also point the finger at the kosher food distributors themselves in central Canada for not making Atlantic Canada a priority.
Sources say that retailers face a dilemma when it comes to supplying kosher food to Halifax, including meat and chicken, because it is such a small market. If they order too little, there will be a shortage. If they order too much, and it doesn’t sell, they have to take a financial hit.
According to longtime Halifax resident Sondra Rutman, who has kept kosher for fifty years, there are now very few people in Halifax who keep kosher to the level of orthodoxy. As a result, she said “some products are left unpurchased–-a loss for the stores.”
In previous years, due to the unreliability of supplies, Rutman herself used to pool resources with other families to order in bulk four times per year from Ontario or Quebec, but that effort has long since gone by the wayside.
“As people who keep kosher died, moved, [or] stopped observing kashrut, these orders became too expensive to ship for a few people and the groups dissolved.
The Jewish community of Halifax is growing, according to the latest numbers in the 2021 Canadian census, and reported by The CJN last month. Since 2011, the number of people in Halifax that identify as Jewish by religion or ethnic origin, has climbed from 2,080 to 2,735. That’s an increase of over 31 percent.
Many newcomers are immigrants who came from Israel, via Russia or Ukraine, but the community is also seeing new arrivals from Toronto or Vancouver, said Rabbi Kerzner.
While the rabbi acknowledged that many Halifax families don’t keep strictly kosher year-round, when it comes to Passover, he was pleasantly surprised at the demand for matzah. The response to his emergency email blast this week was a bit of a silver lining to all the stress he’s been under in recent days.
“Sometimes I’m surprised about everyone who comes out of the woodwork, literally.”
For their part, a spokesperson for the Atlantic Superstore acknowledged to The CJN in an email that the local store had “experienced delays with matzah and other product orders.”
The company said it was “actively working with vendor partners to manage the flow of goods.”
Part of the problem last week was that the Passover section was set up at the back of the store, Rabbi Kerzner said, making it tricky for Jewish customers to find.
For their part, Sobeys’ media relations office underscored the importance of Passover for some of their customers, adding “we want to make sure that we are able to provide them with the products they need to celebrate and observe the holiday with their friends and families.”
However, the store’s flyer for the week of March 30-April 5 featured prominent ads for products for three religious holidays—Easter, Ramadan and Vaisakhi—but nothing about Passover.
A Sobeys spokesperson who gave only the first name Laetitia, said the company is “committed to continually working with our suppliers to maintain our inventory levels” to meet the needs of their customers. However, when asked what specifically caused the supply problems and what measures Sobeys was taking to get product into the stores, there was no response.
According to Rabbi Kerzner, a new shipment of kosher for Passover dairy products and cold cuts has now arrived at the Sobeys store, but no more matzah.
For her part, Sondra Rutman feels there is enough of an assortment of products to hold Passover this coming week.