One of Toronto’s few kosher food banks could face a shutdown this year if the current “perfect storm” of affordability and food security crises doesn’t subside.
Pride of Israel, a Conservative synagogue in North York, has run a kosher food bank for about 35 years. It was Toronto’s first kosher food bank and is one of only a few such programs in and around the city offering exclusively kosher food products to those in need.
Every Wednesday, around 20 volunteers—including some who are members of the congregation—attend to about 125 food bank visitors or an average of 500 visits monthly, according to Alan Marks, a synagogue member and the chair of the food bank who’s been involved since the beginning.
“If we kept at our present rate, I’d say it’s maybe five or six months, and then we would have to close,” said Marks in an interview in February.
The food bank had struggled recently in 2018 and again in 2022, during periods where the necessary money and food donation supports had dwindled.
Now, he says Pride of Israel’s kosher food bank has reached a similar level of need.
“I think actually it’s worse than it was in 2018.”
Food costs and operating the food bank amount to around $1,600 weekly for the entirely volunteer effort. Marks, who was contacting other synagogues about the food bank’s level of need, says exploring new community partnerships is part of what’s happening now.
“We are starting to notify basically all the shuls in town, [and] other organizations that have made donations in the past,” he told The CJN. Outreach efforts began in February, with assistance from Pride of Israel, says Marks, who liaises between the food bank and the synagogue board. While the synagogue supports with resources, he says it does not currently subsidize the food bank, which operates independently, according to Marks.
“If we had a number of organizations that would contribute on a regular basis for that $1,600,” that would help “take the strain off” the food bank’s budget, he said.
“We have Pesach coming up where we really outdo ourselves and we go outside what we budget on buying every week,” he says, adding that food bank users get two weeks at once because of closure for the holiday. “We try to upgrade them, give them chicken products and everything.”
Marks says the food bank is also concerned about incoming tariffs on US products imposed by the current Trump administration in Washington.
“A lot of the kosher food is manufactured in the States, and we could look at a significant increase in the cost of kosher food that we’re buying, without even raising the number of clientele, which we know is increasing,” he says.
“And, of course, the cost of food has gone up… if [this] Trump thing works out, that’s going to really hurt us.
“Things have changed in the last 20 years,” says Marks. “But I don’t remember these problems when we were going for quite a few years… it’s the general economy.”
The struggle to serve demand
The food bank receives an annual “sizable” donation from B’nai Brith Canada that covers at least one week’s costs, he told The CJN. Previously the food bank received funding from other synagogues and charity organizations set up by community members, often through organizations’ discretionary funds, however, Marks says that for the past year or so, much of that support has dried up.
“If some other Jewish organizations… could commit to a regular donation,” it could make the difference, he said. “And we’re not asking all of them to do the $1,600 or so, but just regular donations… 100 here, a couple of hundred [there]” could help keep the kosher food bank going, he explained.
“All the food banks try to help each other—but that doesn’t bring in the money,” he said.
“If there were just more organizations that could help us on a regular basis,” he said, situations like the food bank risking closure wouldn’t keep coming up.
“But I’m sure these organizations are being flooded with requests from other sources for help.”
In one of Canada’s mostly densely populated Jewish areas, from Toronto’s north end stretching into Thornhill and surrounding points in the Greater Toronto Area, some of the local supermarkets and bakeries support with whatever arrangements they can.
“A couple of No Frills help us out in some ways,” like allowing the food bank to bypass, say, a six-item limit on a special on canned foods, said Marks. “They will order in extra and allow us to take what we need, like 120 of an item, so they help that way.”
Olive Branch, a kosher supermarket that opened in 2024 at the Promenade Shopping Centre in Thornhill, has recently added a donation option to transactions, offering customers a chance to have the store donate one percent of a grocery bill to one of a list of Jewish organizations on its registry, among them the food bank.
Other supports also help, Marks acknowledges, like bread donations from a Walmart kosher bakery of products nearing expiry. “Hopefully starting in April,” too, Olive Branch and Grodzinski’s will begin donating kosher baked goods, according to Marks.
North York Harvest Food Bank has helped Pride of Israel’s food bank, and another kosher food bank—run by Beth Sholom Synagogue in the Cedervale area—get by with lower prices on bulk purchases, operating effectively as a wholesaler reselling to organizations, with minimal markup. “And what’s important, the free delivery of it as well,” said Marks.
Every product offered at the Pride of Israel is kosher.
“Because of ourselves and Beth Sholom, they [North York Harvest Food Bank] have even got a separate section on their website for kosher food, and we use them quite a bit,” he said.
Beth Sholom, which operates the other kosher food bank in Toronto, declined The CJN’s requests for an interview.
What’s next for Pride of Israel?
The endangered state of the food bank hasn’t been formally mentioned to users, Marks explains.
“We try to keep it very informal. We don’t ask people their names. We don’t ask them whether they are on welfare. Anybody comes, we give them food.”
He’s attended meetings to discuss challenges facing the food bank and other community programs offered by nearby synagogues and Jewish organizations, but solutions have proven elusive.
“I’ve always said that I would be so happy if there was no need for a kosher food bank,” he said. “That would be my dream, but… I don’t see that ever happening, and if the food bank closes, it’s not the Pride of Israel or [or its food bank] that’s going to suffer. It’s those 125 people that line up on a Wednesday morning, and many of them are families.”
According to a UJA Federation of Greater Toronto campaign email for donations to its Global Seder initiative, more than 10,000 of Toronto’s Jews are living in poverty.
“For more than 10,000 Jews in Toronto—those living below the poverty line—Passover is a difficult time,” read an email from UJA March 23. “Instead of the warmth and joy of a full table, many are facing an empty plate, a silent table, and a crushing sense of isolation. For them, the hardship of the pandemic never ended.”
The message goes on to say that post-pandemic, “food bank usage in the GTA has more than doubled” and that “the number of food bank clients today could fill the Rogers Centre 70 times over. These are our neighbours, our community members, struggling to put food on the table.”
Three Ontario cities—Toronto, Mississauga, and Kingston—have declared food security emergencies in recent months.
York Region council has also asked the newly elected provincial government to increase supports to social programs and to include food insecurity more broadly as part of other affordability solutions, while other Ontario municipalities have raised concerns over food insecurity issues at their city councils.
Help from the city above Toronto
Chasdei Kaduri, a Jewish food bank in Vaughan, Ont., has supported Pride of Israel’s food bank in times such as 2018, according to its executive director, Jonathan Tebeka. He says his organization has helped take on people in need when who those who used the Pride of Israel food bank heard it might close, as had been the case in 2022.
With its own, dedicated intake process for each client household, Chasdei Kaduri also delivers to its food bank’s recipients, which Tebeka says helps people preserve dignity and resist feelings of shame.
The food insecurity situation is “the worst it’s ever been,” he says, including at the peak of the pandemic. Higher interest rates and inflation have meant that people have to make tough choices about expenses, including groceries.
He says the past year and a half to two years “have been the worst,” leading to the current “perfect storm” of socioeconomic conditions. Clients are now sometimes waiting months before being added to a list of recipients of food deliveries, he explains.
“When I have to tell people there are others in more need,” they are shocked, he said. “We want to be able to assist not only the worst of the worst.”
In the area, programs do exist such as a kind of kosher Meals on Wheels at Bernard Betel Centre in North York, or pantries at some synagogues, as organized United Chesed.
“Our [Chasdei Kaduri’s] job is to run an effective organization that is also sustainable … make sure we are managing the resources we are receiving, or not, in bad or good times… [and that we are] helping out as many people as possible.”
He says that “as a society, as a people, we need to do our best, especially in the Jewish community” to provide access to kosher food for those in need. He mentions potential links between food insecurity and the chance of dissociation from the Jewish community.
“You’re helping people within the Jewish community you see at the grocery store or the community centre, your neighbours… you just don’t know it,” said Tebeka.
Navigating a new economic threat
Mazon Canada, an organization billed as providing “the Jewish response to hunger,” raises funds, mostly within the Jewish community, to allocate “on a non-denominational basis to frontline organizations that provide food to the needy,” such as food banks, or initiatives like school food programs, many of which are outside of the Jewish community.
However, with the threat of American tariffs, Mazon is strongly advocating for a basic food support program like the COVID-era temporary payments to Canadians, in this case to combat the current affordability crisis.
In a post earlier in March, Mazon suggested its potential approaches include lobbying for more support for food banks in times of flux, and creating government “CERB-like” food programs along with regionally focused support for workers in areas suffering significant job losses, such as resolving employment insurance backlogs to ensure people can buy groceries.
“While Mazon will continue to provide immediate support to frontline food programs, we cannot solve this crisis alone. We need a coordinated response from all levels of government to protect vulnerable Canadians,” read an email from Mazon in March.
Mazon’s executive director, Izzy Waxman, says that about 10 percent of residents in the city of Toronto now rely on food banks, following a November 2024 report by Daily Bread Food Bank and North York Harvest Food Bank. Titled Who’s Hungry?, the report cited 3.5 million client visits to Toronto food banks, representing nearly one million more visits than the previous year, and a 273 percent increase in visits since before the pandemic.
“We are in a food insecurity crisis in Toronto,” said Waxman, which impacts food banks’ capacity take on new folks in need.
“Most food banks need some structure to say yes or no, because unfortunately, they can’t say yes to everyone, and even the people they say yes to, they can’t provide everything that person needs.”
Food banks across Ontario have had to reduce how much food they can give each person, says Waxman, by as much as 30 percent in some cases.
When a food bank does close, she says, its clients who still need help will often look for a similar organization in the same area.
“[This] compounds the already pretty crushing demand those organizations are facing,” she says. “These Jewish projects are not alone. Permanent closures [of some food banks] are happening,” she says, adding that many organizations, both inside and outside the Jewish community face similar closure situations.
Waxman says she hopes institutions feeling the pinch, like the Pride of Israel food bank, can consider mergers or collaboration if such efforts “no longer have the capacity to run a completely independent program.”
However, she acknowledges “there are a lot of organizations struggling, and it is hard to find a silver lining,” in particular, the Mazon director points out, when Canadian food banks were designed as temporary measures, rather than a system meant to be a long-term solution.
“It’s definitely harder than ever in this hunger crisis at this moment, but also this is a problem with the entire Canadian model,” says Waxman.
“Everywhere across the country, it’s up to volunteers and a small number of paid staff to shoulder the burden of relieving people of the effects of poverty.
“The fact that these organizations open, and they run for as long as they can based on the energy of their leadership and the strength of this community, and they close… and something else opens when someone else can no longer tolerate the fact that there’s nothing being done… That’s an unsustainable model for handling poverty response in Canada.”
(This story was updated March 27)
Why Are Canada’s Food Banks Collapsing? – https://t.co/EUfeuq9vjE https://t.co/6FXTXZcaBY
— Dominic Ali (@domali3) January 13, 2025
