In 1788, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the Alter Rebbe and founder of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, set up a tzedakah fund to support the poor of Eretz Yisrael. It collected coins from Jewish households in Europe and got them to families in the Holy Land. That fund is Colel Chabad. It has operated continuously since then. Two hundred and thirty-eight years later, it is still doing the same job.
The collection part looks different now. The distribution part looks different too. What has not changed is the shape of the thing: Jews outside Israel sending money and food to Jews inside Israel, on a schedule, without waiting for a crisis to justify it.
Pantry Packers is where that history becomes physical. It is Colel Chabad’s hands-on packing facility in Talpiot, Jerusalem, and it is built around a plain act. You come in. You put on gloves and an apron. You bag rice, beans, lentils, pasta. The bags get sealed and labeled and go into the crates that Colel Chabad delivers to families across the country.
A donation is a decision. A shift is an hour and a half of your hands.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Writing a check takes about ninety seconds and happens in private. Standing at a table with your kids, filling a bag of lentils that will sit in someone’s kitchen, takes ninety minutes and happens in a room full of other people doing the same thing. The first is tzedakah. So is the second. Only one of them leaves a mark on the person doing it.
The numbers since 2013
Pantry Packers opened its volunteer operation in 2013. Since then, more than 24,000 people have packed food in the 6,000-square-foot facility. Together they have filled over 630,000 bags of dry staples. Those bags become part of the monthly food baskets Colel Chabad distributes to households living below the poverty line, along with the at-cost supermarkets, the soup kitchens, and the Meals on Wheels deliveries.
The recipients are screened by local social service departments. Nobody is asked to prove anything at the door. The food arrives and the family eats it.
I have written elsewhere about what a bag of lentils says to the person who opens it, and it says more than most donors think about: https://kolbinah.com/en/item/what-a-bag-of-lentils-tells-the-person-who-receives-it–fdc808675642. A sealed, clean bag of a staple that fits the family’s actual cooking is a different object than a box of whatever was on sale. The people packing in Jerusalem are the ones who decide which it will be.
Why the kids have to do it themselves
Parents ask the same question before they book: is this going to hold my children’s attention for ninety minutes? Usually the answer is yes, and the reason is that there is real work with real equipment. There are machines to run, bags to stamp, boxes to stack. A four-year-old can stamp. A sixteen-year-old can run the sealer. Nobody stands around watching.
That is the part I keep coming back to when parents tell me they want their children to understand giving. You cannot explain tzedakah into a child. You can put a bag of rice in their hands and tell them where it is going, and they get it in about four seconds. I went into this at more length here: https://kolbinah.com/en/item/why-your-children-need-to-pack-food-with-their-own-hands–150591daea98.
The logistics, since parents need those before they need the philosophy
Sessions run Sunday through Thursday, six slots a day, ninety minutes each, starting at 9:00 in the morning and running to 7:15 at night. The room is indoors, air-conditioned, and wheelchair accessible. There is no age minimum and no age maximum. The oldest volunteer so far was 99. The youngest was a few months old, which mostly means the parents packed and the baby supervised.
Groups of up to 50 can be accommodated. Bar and bat mitzvah families book it constantly, sometimes as the whole celebration. Synagogues, day schools, tour groups, and corporate teams fill the rest of the calendar. The one hard rule is supervision: two adults for every six children under 14, and a maximum of 30 children in a birthday group.
It sits off Derech Moshe Baram in Talpiot, around the corner from the fire station, a two-minute walk from the Moshe Baram Junction bus stop. Fourteen minutes from the center of town when traffic cooperates. Waze finds it if you type Pantry Packers in English.
What the ninety minutes actually is
The session opens with a short film and a discussion about what tzedakah is and why the food matters. Then you work for the rest of the session.
What you leave with is not a feeling of having helped. It is closer to having joined something. The fund the Alter Rebbe started in 1788 was built on the idea that Jews in one place are responsible for Jews in another, and that the responsibility runs on a schedule rather than on sentiment. A family that packs a box in Talpiot in November is standing inside that idea, whether or not they know the year it started.
Most of them do not know the year. They find out in the opening film. Then they put on the gloves.