Your family can write a check to feed the hungry from anywhere in the world. You can set up monthly donations, sponsor meals, even adopt entire families through various programs. All of these matter. None of them teach your children what tzedakah actually feels like.
The difference between knowing about giving and experiencing it runs deeper than most parents realize. When your eight-year-old seals a bag of lentils that will sit on someone’s Shabbat table, something changes in how they understand their place in the world. They stop seeing poverty as an abstract problem adults handle and start seeing it as something they can address with their own two hands.
This is why Pantry Packers exists. Not because the world lacks food distribution programs, but because families need a way to give that includes everyone from toddlers to grandparents in the same room doing the same work.
What happens when families pack together
The mechanics are simple. You walk into our Jerusalem facility, put on gloves, and spend 90 minutes filling bags with dried goods. Beans, lentils, pasta, rice. Basic staples that form the foundation of family meals. Your job is to measure, seal, and stack. The bags you pack go directly into monthly food baskets for families living below the poverty line throughout Israel.
What makes it work for families is what most volunteer programs get wrong about children. There are no age restrictions because the task itself accommodates every ability level. A four-year-old can hold a bag open while their older sibling measures. A teenager can operate the vacuum sealer while their parent labels boxes. Everyone contributes something real to the same outcome.
The 90-minute format matters too. Long enough for the work to feel substantial, short enough that nobody loses focus. You leave knowing exactly what you accomplished: X bags packed, Y families fed. The math is concrete and the impact is immediate.
The facility itself reinforces this. Six thousand square feet dedicated entirely to food assembly and distribution. Industrial equipment, professional logistics, serious scale. Your children see that this is not a craft project or a field trip activity. It is work that feeds people, and they are doing it.
Why the work itself teaches what donations cannot
Writing a check teaches generosity. Packing food teaches responsibility.
The distinction matters because children learn differently than adults. They need to feel the weight of the bag, see the pile grow, understand that someone will open what they sealed. Abstract concepts like poverty and hunger become concrete when your child asks why some families need food delivered to them and you have to give a real answer.
The physical nature of the work also levels the family in ways that surprise parents. Your ten-year-old might be faster at sealing bags than you are. Your teenager might be better at organizing the assembly line. Everyone contributes according to their ability, which is exactly how tzedakah is supposed to work.
This creates conversations that happen nowhere else. When your child asks whether the family receiving their bag has children their age, you are no longer talking about charity as something good people do. You are talking about obligation as something Jewish families carry.
The 238-year chain your family joins
Pantry Packers operates under Colel Chabad, which the Alter Rebbe established in 1788 to support the poor of Eretz Yisrael. When your family packs food today, you are continuing a specific tradition of communal responsibility that has operated continuously for 238 years.
This history is not decoration. It is the reason the program works the way it does. The Alter Rebbe did not create a charity. He created a system where Jewish communities outside of Israel took responsibility for Jewish families inside it. The mechanism has evolved, but the principle remains identical.
Your children need to understand this. They are not volunteers helping the unfortunate. They are Jews fulfilling an obligation to other Jews. The work they do today connects directly to collections their ancestors made in European shtetls and donations their great-grandparents sent from America.
More than 24,000 people have worked in the Pantry Packers facility since 2013. They have packed over 630,000 bags. Those numbers represent families, but they also represent continuity. Each person who walks through those doors becomes part of something larger than their individual act of giving.
What your family takes home
The immediate impact is measurable. Bags packed, families fed, children who understand that tzedakah is something you do with your body, not just your wallet. But the lasting effect runs deeper.
Your children learn that being Jewish means taking responsibility for other Jews. Not because it makes you feel good, though it might. Not because it teaches valuable lessons, though it does. Because it is what you owe.
They also learn that meaningful work does not require special skills or extensive training. It requires showing up and doing what needs to be done. This lesson applies far beyond tzedakah, but tzedakah is where many children first encounter it.
Most importantly, they learn that their family is the kind of family that gives. Not occasionally, not when convenient, but as a matter of course. Even on vacation. Even when traveling. Even when it would be easier to write a check from home.
The program accommodates groups up to 50 people, making it practical for extended families celebrating bar or bat mitzvahs, synagogue trips, or any family visiting Jerusalem who wants their time there to count for something beyond sightseeing.
Your children will remember the Western Wall and Masada from your Israel trip. They will also remember the morning they spent packing food for families they will never meet. Years later, when they plan their own family trips or decide how to give tzedakah with their own children, they will know that some kinds of giving require your presence, your time, and your hands.