Founded in 1985, MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger is a national, nonprofit agency that allocates donations from the Jewish community to prevent and alleviate hunger among people of all faiths and backgrounds.

Each year, MAZON grants over $3 million to more than 300 carefully screened hunger-relief agencies, including emergency food providers, food banks, multi-service organizations and advocacy groups that seek long-term solutions to the hunger problem.


OUR PHILOSOPHY
MAZON (“food” in Hebrew) believes our dual purpose is to provide for those who are hungry today, as well as to address the systemic causes of hunger and poverty, both domestically and globally.

Although grants are provided to many organizations serving the Jewish poor, in keeping with the best of Jewish tradition MAZON believes it is important to respond to all who are in need. Read more about hunger and the Jewish response.


OUR SUPPORT
Through MAZON, Jews give voice to the Torah’s call for justice. More than 850 synagogues throughout the United States have affirmed "partnerships" with MAZON, thereby embracing the traditional Jewish commitment to sustain the hungry. Learn more about becoming a MAZON partner.

MAZON also enjoys the support of over 100,000 individual donors, who incorporate social justice and hunger relief as crucial components of their everyday lives. MAZON’s supporters help hungry people by donating three percent of the cost of weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs and other joyous and life-cycle events; by contributing to MAZON at the High Holy Days, Chanukah and Passover; and by making contributions in honor or in memory of friends and loved ones. Learn more about how you can help fight hunger.


OUR GRANTEES
MAZON’s grantees reflect the diversity of hunger in the United States and across the globe. With MAZON’s assistance:

• Project Angel Food in Los Angeles continues to deliver meals to home-bound AIDS patients and people with other life-threatening illnesses;
  
  
• Sustainable Food Center in Texas is able to put at-risk youth to work selling produce at local farmstands;
  
  
• the White Earth Land Recovery Project in Minnesota continues its traditional food program to combat diabetes and improve tribal health on the White Earth Indian Reservation;
  
  
• St. John’s Bread and Life in New York City keeps the doors open at one of the metropolis’ largest soup kitchens;
  
  
• SeaShare in Washington salvages 1.3 million pounds of fresh salmon, halibut, sole and turbot and brings it to the tables of hungry people around the state;
  
  
• Food Research and Action Center in the District of Columbia offers advocacy leadership and technical support to anti-hunger programs around the country;
  
  
• Jewish Family Service of Central New Jersey operates the only kosher food pantry in its county;
  
  
• International Medical Corps brings desperately needed food to seriously malnourished children and pregnant women around the world;
  
  
• Table to Table in Tel Aviv rescues excess food from catered events and uses it to provide 2,500 meals each week to people in need.
  
  Click here to find out more about our grantmaking.

OUR HISTORY
Founded on the heels of the Ethiopian famine of 1985, MAZON was conceived as a bridge between the abundance in the Jewish community and the desperate need felt by millions of hungry people around the world.

MAZON Founder Leonard Fein recognized the injustice of this disparity – the Jewish community’s annual expenditures on catered celebrations, on the one hand, and the devastating Ethiopian famine, on the other – and formed MAZON as a response.

Historically, rabbis did not allow celebrations to begin until the community’s poor and hungry people were seated and fed. MAZON offers Jews a symbolic way to observe this tradition by donating 3% of the cost of life-cycle celebrations, such as bar/bat mitzvahs, weddings, anniversaries and other joyous occasions, to help feed those who are less fortunate.

In 1986, the first year of MAZON’s grant making, MAZON distributed $20,000 in cash grants to four hunger-relief organizations. To date, MAZON has made thousands of grants, totaling more than $40 million, to the most effective hunger-relief organizations in the United States, in Israel and in developing countries around the world.