The availability of kosher food is limited throughout Syracuse, with just one hard-to-find kosher restaurant, sparse grocery stores options and scarce Syracuse University’s choices are, residents say.
With Passover beginning Wednesday evening, access to kosher food is critical.
Rabbi Yaakov Rapoport, executive director of Chabad Lubavitch Central New York, said an important aspect of eating kosher is to use kosher meat.
“Eating out in Syracuse is very difficult because there are no kosher restaurants except for the bistro,” Rapoport said.
However, many people will eat vegetarian at a non-kosher restaurant, Rapoport said. Vegetarian food is considered more acceptable than non-kosher meat or pork.
The small population of Jewish people in the city could be a reason why there aren’t more kosher restaurants, Rapoport said.
“This is a problem for any community with less than 25,0000 Jews,” he said. “The lack of restaurants for some people is a major problem, but there are many people who keep kosher in their home but not outside which is better than not keeping kosher at all.”
Only 2% of the 459,214 people in Onondaga County identify as Jewish, according to data from the 2020 Census of American Religion.
Rapoport said there used to be a kosher butcher shop in the city, but now the big kosher food companies have taken over.
“They package it, and they Cryovac it so you can find it now in many major supermarkets and places like Costco,” he said.
During Passover, the status of kosher is different than other times of year, Rapoport explained.
“We can’t have anything leavened. So therefore, nothing made from wheat, barley, oats, spelt, except for matzah, which are made under very strict conditions,” Rapoport said.
The only kosher restaurant in Syracuse
The lone kosher restaurant is inside a Jewish long-term care center Menorah Park on the city’s east side.
Jim & Arlene Gerber Bistro, found at Menorah Park, has had outside patrons, but is designed to service the residents and employees of the center, said Dylan Freid, the food service manager.
“Upstairs, the whole kitchen is kosher. We have two sides, one for meat and one for dairy. We have different plates, different silverware and everything for those different meals,” Freid said. “We’re following all the kosher laws and Rabbi Evan Shore knows that we care a lot, but he will pop in and check on things.”
The bistro has only one kitchen, so they serve only non-dairy products. It is open to the public, but also serves as a place where residents can get a break from the typical meals they serve, Freid said.
“If we put enough love into the food, it’s always really good and we do because this is their escape from the menu.”
Freid said outside visitors are typically people visiting family members, college students or the occasional traveler passing through the city on a trip.
“I've had people call from Canada a couple of times and say, ‘Hey, we’re on our way down, can we stop and get something?’ And I wish we had more options for them because it's only just a small bistro,” he said.
In preparation for Passover, Freid said they have separate dishes, and ingredients they only use for the week. In addition, they go through a process to make the kitchen kosher.
“We start with koshering everything. So we take all the surfaces of the kitchen and pour boiling water over them, take all the tools and boil them for a certain amount of time then keep them set aside from everything that hasn’t been koshered yet,” Freid said.
When this is complete, they take a new inventory of all the ingredients they have but if it wasn’t purchased for Passover, they don’t use it during that time period.
“We have a whole storage room full of dishes and ingredients that we only use for Passover,” Freid said.
Kosher food on SU campus
The share of Jewish students at Syracuse University is more than the surrounding area. According to Hillel, an on-campus Jewish student organization, there are 3,000 Jewish students out of the more than 20,000 on campus.
But, access to kosher food is limited, students said.
“You have to call 45 minutes to an hour in advance to place an order,” sophomore Andrew Sender said. “It's hard to sometimes plan for that with things going on during the day.”
The meals are available at Shaw Dining Hall, which Sender says isn’t a central location on campus and can be hard to get to between classes.
“For kosher reasons, we got ourselves an [off-campus] apartment because the whole process was not meeting our needs,” Sender said. “It was very, very tough to keep kosher because we eat dairy out, but we only eat kosher meat, and it was tough to go a certain number of weeks without eating meat.”
Sender and three other students were able to get approval from the university for off-campus housing which they typically only allow for juniors, seniors, and graduate students.
“I think it would be nice if there was a little kosher section in a main campus [dining hall],” Sender said. “There is a gluten-free section or a vegetarian section, just a small place whether it was some pieces of chicken, cutlets, or cold cuts, anything like that would be phenomenal,” Sender said.