New York's Food Distribution Networks Brace for an Unprecedented Threat

Alexander Rapaport, the executive director of the kosher Masbia Soup Kitchen Network, started worrying on March 5. It was four days until Purim, and Passover would begin April 8. How was he going to feed his walk-in clients if they were sick or under quarantine? Normally, New Yorkers — Jewish or otherwise — would come into one of Masbia’s three city locations to pick up or eat their food, but with the coronavirus looming, Mr. Rapaport decided to pack hundreds of boxes with low-weight packaged food that he could deliver door to door.

“There’s no glass, there’s no bottles, there’s no dead space,” he said, standing in the organization’s headquarters in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn. “It’s like a big puzzle.”