MAZON: A Jewish Response To Hunger

Specialties

MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger is a national nonprofit organization working to end hunger among people of all faiths and backgrounds in the United States and Israel.

History

Established in 1985.

MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger was founded by Leonard Fein in 1985, on the heels of the famine in Ethiopia. Mr. Fein created MAZON to be a bridge between the relative abundance of the American Jewish community and the desperate need felt by millions of hungry people around the world.

MAZON began soliciting donations by encouraging American Jews to donate a portion of the cost of life-​cycle celebrations (weddings, bar/​bat mitzvahs, anniversaries, and other joyous occasions), a modern interpretation of the ancient rabbinical tradition of not allowing a celebration to begin until the community’s poor and hungry were seated and fed. Rabbis at synagogues all across the country responded to our call to action and encouraged their congregants to support MAZON.

Today, MAZON is blessed to have an extended family of nearly 1,000 synagogues and tens of thousands of individual donors, all of whom share our commitment to ending hunger once and for all.