(Queens Chronicle) — Economic hard times come and go. Covid came and mostly went. Administrations and priorities in City Hall, Albany and Washington can change with the prevailing wind.

But in Forest Hills, Masbia of Queens has weathered every storm since it opened in 2010, never losing sight of its single focus: welcoming and giving a helping hand to people who need food.

It happens in Masbia’s facilities at 105-47 64 Road. A free hot meal with trimmings and drink is served from 3 to 9 p.m., Sunday through Thursday. Food pantry parcels, designed to assist families for several days, are given out those same days by appointment.

“Every day there is a different blessing and a different challenge,” said Alexander Rapaport, Masbia’s executive director.

“We open at 3 p.m. for an early dinner,” Rapaport said. “We’re a little above 100 meals per day. Not long ago we would go only to 7 p.m.”

No appointments are necessary for the meals, and people are welcome every day Masbia is open.

With about 200 families utilizing the food pantry every day, the organization has started scheduling them through an app called Plentiful, which Rapaport said keeps things efficient yet flexible. The app does limit recipients to one visit every seven days.

“It works in 10 languages,” he said.

The app can be found on Google or through a link on Masbia’s website, masbiaqueens.org/getfood.

“We have five-minute appointments,” Rapaport said, explaining that the group can accommodate more on the fly if possible.

“That has to do with the amount of food we have and the number of volunteers on hand,” he said. “Or is something happening meanwhile? Are we getting a big delivery?”

The group was in the middle of a big delivery just as Rapaport picked up his phone. A food rescue organization was delivering thousands of containers of brand-name spices that had passed the date by which they could be sold in stores, but still were perfectly good for use and consumption.

And the containers were specifically marked at the factory as kosher. Some, Rapaport said, will be used by Masbia’s soup kitchen cooks; others will be placed out for use by the diners.

Still more will be included in the food pantry parcels headed to people’s homes while supplies last.

“It’s a nice extra,” Rapaport said. “It’s one of the things we’ve learned to leverage. They’re still good, but they would have gone into a landfill. Spices are something people who use our food pantry won’t usually get.”

Usually, Rapaport said, there is a rush for pantry appointments at and just after 3 p.m.

“Right when dinner starts,” he said. “We play with peaks and other things. And then we can start with two appointments every five minute and go to five appointments. We can stagger it based on our ability. And you can usually make an appointment one hour out. What that means is if you want to go to the pantry, go to the app and see appointments are taken, you can wait a little bit and get to the next hour and one will be there.”

Rapaport said the group’s numbers — 100 or more sitdown dinner guests and 200 food pantry visitors each day — are difficult to use as a gauge on conditions in Queens overall, the city or anywhere else.

“This is the one thing we do,” he said. “We do this every day with the resources we have.

“For us, there was a rush after all the resources that were available during Covid ran out. Donors were fatigued. We were, too. We had been running 24 hours and now we’re running 12 to 9 p.m., and only open to the public 3 to 9 — drastically different than we were five years ago in June.”

Far smaller things, he noted, can have an impact. He said if past is prologue, when the word gets out in the coming days that spices are being included in the food parcels, interest in appointments is likely to pick up as people learn that from neighbors, family or friends.

On the other hand, Rapaport said, if word gets out in the beginning of the week that they are heavy on canned and dry food but low on fresh produce, those more interested in produce may hold off.

“People ask me what I do for a living and I say, ‘I master randomness,” Rapaport said. “There is so much that is random in this business.

“It’s all based on our abilities and our resources. We control the pantry based on what we can handle. We have two other pantries in Brooklyn, and we run them like Starbucks — we have our booklet for everything we do. On the other hand, every neighborhood has their own needs, their own accommodations.”

“It’s micro and macro. If we had a lot more staff and had a lot more food, we could add more five-minute appointments than we have now. So we push ourselves. That’s the true way to look at it. I would love to do more than 200 appointments day.”

Not all Masbia’s clients are Jewish.

“We are very well-known in the non-Jewish community,” Rapaport said. “We are kosher, but remember, our app works in 10 languages … But we still don’t want to forget our roots, and the people we opened to serve.”

The group recently hired Rabbi Emanuel Yelizarov as its new mashgiach, or supervisor of kosher food standards and preparation toward that end.

Many emergency food providers in the borough and the city have been reaching out to try and reverse or at least offset federal funding cuts for things like emergency food and SNAP nutritional benefits that have come out of Washington, DC, since January.

Rapaport said there are two answers about the impact on Masbia.

“We are almost entirely dependent on private donations,” he said. “While these things do wind up having some effect, everything has a bit of an effect. If eggs go up, it has an effect.”

Just before Masbia’s major pre-Passover fundraiser this year, a number of tariffs were announced, causing some steep drops in the stock market.

“Same of our donors got jittery, and we got smaller donations,” he said.

The site itself, Rapaport said, like any other restaurant or food service site, needs to be constantly maintained and upgraded. The extra hours worked at Covid’s peak took their toll on the building and machinery as well as the workers.

While the group has done things like replace its conveyer belt, everything down to the light fixtures always needs to be kept in working order.

And just like Starbucks and every other business, markets and economics are a fact of life.

In an interview a few years go, Rapaport spoke of the challenge to find the most affordable deals on eggs. Not right now.

“I used to say eggs are the poor man’s protein, but not anymore,” he said. “We got some before Passover because they play an integral part. But now they’re as expensive as chicken.”

Masbia now tries to supplant them with any beans and canned salmon and tuna it can get.

For food and other items on Masbia’s wish list, its website has the appropriately titled link masbia.com/wishlist, through which people can donate food and other needed items through Amazon and other vendors.

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