http://www.masbiaboropark.org/fire

Posted: Oct 04, 2017 7:05 PM EDT; Updated: Oct 04, 2017 9:08 PM EDT

BOROUGH PARK - A Brooklyn soup kitchen will be open throughout the week to help those in need celebrate the Jewish holiday Sukkot.

By Isser Berg

BORO PARK - The Masbia soup kitchen in Boro Park will operate this Yom Tov in the sukkah of Congregation Shomrei Shabbos, with food provided by the Herzog family.

Courtesy of Masbia Soup Kitchen Network: Masbia Soup Kitchen Network’s new Boro Park location, set up for Shabbat.

This is the first in a series of essays submitted by our readers about their personal Shabbat experiences. Shabbat — the gatherings, the traditions and rituals, the food — is observed in such a wide variety of ways and we’re interested to read your recollections and stories. They might be about a particularly delicious dinner or dish (or a particularly awful one); a funny or challenging cooking or dining situation — it’s up to you. Click here to submit your essay. (Please put “Shabbat story” in the subject line.)

On Friday noon, my kids — who came straight from school — and I began making the rounds to all the local Boro Park shops to prepare for Shabbos meals at Masbia Soup Kitchen Network’s new Boro Park location, where my family and I joined clients for dinner Friday night and lunch on Saturday. We are lucky because our site happens to be right in the center of Boro Park’s “Shabbos District” — if you would allow me to coin the term — right by the 55th Street station of the D train. So we have everything we need at our fingertips.

November 15, 2016

By Sandy Eller

Brooklyn, NY - Seven months after closing the doors of its Borough Park location, Masbia Soup Kitchen is once again open for business serving meals to the hungry, this time at a new location.

Located right near Borough Park’s Shomrei Shabbos synagogue at the corner of New Utrecht Avenue and 54th Street, the new Masbia location opened for business last Wednesday. Just one day earlier, Masbia’s executive director Alexander Rapaport invited three local rabbis, Rabbi Isaac Tirnauer, rov of the Shomrei Shabbos synagogue, the Kossover Rebbe, Rabbi Shraga Feivish Hager and the Hivnover Rebbe, Rabbi Avraham Friedlander, to the location to hang a mezuza on the door.

November 11, 2016

By Liza Schoenfein

Courtesy of Masbia Soup Kitchen Network: Affixing the mezuzah at the door of the new Boro Park location are Masbia Executive Director Alexander Rapaport (left), Rabbi Isaac Tirnauer of Shomrei Shabbos (center) and Rabbi Abraham Friedlander.

The Boro Park branch of Masbia Soup Kitchen Network finally opened its doors Wednesday night, serving a hearty chicken dinner to a handful of hungry clients, after serious financial constraints resulted in delays over the past several months.

So it was all the more satisfying for Masbia’s tireless executive director, Alexander Rapaport, when on Tuesday night three prominent Boro Park rabbis affixed a mezuzah at the front door. In attendance were the Hivnov Rov, the Rov of 24-hour synagogue Shomrei Shabbos and the Kosov Rebbe, as well as Rapaport and his father, Yosef Rapaport.

August 17, 2016

By Liza Schoenfein

Courtesy of Masbia: The new Boro Park location, at New Utrecht Avenue and 54th Street, has yet to open.

Alexander Rapaport and the people who depend on him for food are living on promises. The latest, yet to be delivered, is one of the key factors holding up the opening of his new soup kitchen in Boro Park.

In the weeks leading up to the Forth of July, Rapaport, who is Masbia Soup Kitchen Network’s executive director, said the opening of the organization’s new location was imminent.

“Not months, maybe not even weeks, maybe days,” he said then. “As soon as the place is basically set up — because we’re not going to play games with people’s lives.”

Six weeks later, the site has yet to open and Rapaport finds himself in the middle of a complicated situation.

What do Brooklyn’s poorest residents have in common with the guests at Bella and Edward’s wedding in the popular vampire movie The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1?

They could soon find themselves eating off the elegant dinnerware featured at the fictional wedding reception.

Masbia Soup Kitchen Network, a project to alleviate hunger among New York’s poor, has been seeking donations of money and kitchen equipment as it prepares to open at a new location in the heavily Orthodox Brooklyn neighborhood of Boro Park.

Enter: Tammy Carmona, a party planner and creative whirlwind, who owns a Brooklyn-based tabletop company called Carmona New York. Carmona responded to Masbia’s plea on Facebook for almost 200 items it was still lacking for the new facility.

“Talk to me about dishes,” Carmona messaged the group.

Alexander Rapaport, Masbia’s executive director and co-founder (with Mordechai Mandelbaum), quickly got in touch, and a week later acquired 250 place settings of a pattern called Twilight, which Carmona designed for the vampire movie. She values her donation at more than $15,000. (Oprah Winfrey named Carmona dinnerware one of her favorite things of 2013.)