Two million pounds of kosher food and $2 million for a new warehouse. Met Council, the poverty-fighting nonprofit in New York City, paired both milestones on Wednesday, as New York Gov. Kathy Hochul joined the organization at its Brooklyn Hub to help distribute kosher staples amid the High Holy Day season. 

New York state Sen. Sam Sutton, who represents the heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhoods of Borough Park, Flatbush and Midwood, provided a $1 million matching grant for a new facility in Canarsie, Brooklyn, Met Council CEO David Greenfield told eJewishPhilanthropy. The grant, issued as “community funding” through his senate office, closed out a $25 million fundraising campaign that the organization launched for the “AI-backed” 22,000-square-foot warehouse, which is expected to open in the coming weeks. The $1 million in state funding was matched by donors and members of the Met Council’s board. 

“We were a few million dollars short, and so the senator said, ‘Look, I want to create a challenge. I’ll give [state] money if you give money,’” said Greenfield.

Also this year, the anti-poverty organization is distributing over 2 million pounds of kosher food through early October, a record for its High Holy Days food distribution. According to Greenfield, the amount of food — distributed in 162 events across shuls, yeshivas and “community tzedakah organizations” — also represents a record for kosher food distribution in the United States. 

“No one’s giving out more kosher food for the High Holy Days than we are. That’s the largest kosher food distribution in America around the High Holidays so far,” Greenfield said.

On Wednesday, both Hochul and Sutton joined Met Council for its food distribution in Borough Park, in which it distributed over 100,000 pounds of food in one day. 

The full haul to be distributed through early October — 2,016,982 pounds of food — consisted of 55,026 bottles of grape juice, 48,384 bottles of honey and 659,432 pounds of fresh produce, as well as chicken, frozen fish, eggs and other pantry staples. This year, food distribution took place across New York City, Long Island, New Jersey, and — for the first time — Florida, Greenfield told eJP. 

According to Greenfield, the organization began preparing for the High Holy Days season in June and typically spends two to four months sourcing food to meet varied kosher certification needs. For their next major push before Passover, the Met Council expects to expand to more than 200 sites, he said. 

This year, said Greenfield, the Met Council has fielded an 18% increase in food requests compared to last year. He attributed the increased scale of food distribution in part to the rising need due to increasing food costs. A 2023 UJA-Federation of New York study found that roughly 1 in  Jewish households is “poor or near-poor.” 

“Food prices have gone up something like 40% in the last five years,” said Greenfield, “and certainly for most working-class New Yorkers, their salaries have not gone up by 40%.”