Inflation drives up Passover food prices for US Jews

NEW YORK (AP) — Shopping for Passover on a recent day at a kosher supermarket in the Hasidic Jewish section of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, Moshe Werzberger worried about how inflation is driving up prices during one of the most important holidays for Jews.

“It affects us very much,” said the 23-year-old, who recently canceled plans to vacation in Florida with his wife and 2-year-old son because of skyrocketing prices. Inflation has become a main topic of debate for worshippers at his synagogue and also in his extended family as they share the celebratory Passover meals, Seders.

“It just keeps on going up and up …” he said as announcements rang out in Yiddish on the store's intercom. “And at some point it’s going to have to stop, or no one is going to be able to afford to go shopping.”

As households feel the squeeze of surging consumer prices, some U.S. Jewish families observing Passover have struggled to pay for eggs, gefilte fish and the unleavened bread known as matzo, which represents their ancestors’ exodus from slavery in Egypt.

The need is so great that the Met Council, which runs the country’s largest kosher food pantry, expects to supply a record of nearly 3 million pounds of food in Passover packages and $500,000 in emergency food cards among the Jewish community in greater New York City and New Jersey.

“We’ve been doing charitable work for 50 years, and we’ve never seen anything like this,” said David Greenfield, the council's executive director. He added that there's “no question” that hundreds of thousands of families are eating less meat during Passover, which this year falls from April 15 to 23.

Grocery prices rose 10% in March on a year-on-year basis — the most in 41 years — driven by higher prices for poultry, fish, eggs, beef and other...