By Rachel Ringler
This year, Rachel Levine is glad her family is heading to a Passover program in Arizona, departing from their tradition of hosting very large seders at their Manhattan home.
It’s not the cooking, the cleanup, or the wear and tear on her home that Levine is most relieved to sidestep. It’s the eggs.
In a typical year, she would buy at least 12 dozen eggs just for the first two days of the holiday. This year, with avian flu decimating the egg supply, that feels impossible.
“Making Pesach is always daunting, but the thought of having to do it with this egg shortage seems terrifying,” said Levine, a psychologist, mother of four and the wife of the rabbi at the Jewish Center on the Upper West Side.
Eggs are essential to Passover, as a symbolic food on the seder plate and an essential ingredient in cuisine limited by the holiday’s strict restrictions on leavened food. Many sponge cake recipes, for example, are made with potato starch and require a dozen or more eggs.
But this year, eggs are in short supply because of the spread of avian flu, which has required producers to slaughter 150 million birds in the last two years, including 30 million since the start of 2025.
As the supply of eggs has fallen, their price has skyrocketed to record levels. Many stores have set limits on how many customers can buy — if any are available at all. Across the country, shoppers routinely find empty shelves.
That poses a pressing concern for Jews preparing for Passover, which this year begins the night of April 12.
“Aside from the symbolism, just the pragmatics — you are so limited by all the other restrictions on the holiday,” said Levine’s husband, Rabbi Yosie Levine. “To be limited by eggs, too? I don’t know what people are going to do.”
Advance planners are already starting to come up with strategies. Some are planning to stock up, buying eggs a dozen at a time in the leadup to the holiday. (The USDA says eggs can typically last three to five weeks after purchase if refrigerated properly.)
For them, having to hunt down costly eggs — $5 a dozen on average, up from $2.45 a year ago — doesn’t change the Passover calculus all that much.
Sue Fishbain of Illinois said in an email: “Let’s face it, Pesach is SOOOO expensive anyway. If one keeps kosher, will we actually know the difference? Finding eggs in our area changes from day to day. I’ve seen empty shelves, and I’ve seen them full with high prices, but I have always found some.”
Others are rejiggering their menus to hedge against egg availability. Katja Goldman, a chef and cookbook author in New York City, is considering taking her sponge cake off the menu and serving an egg-free dessert — perhaps something springy like rhubarb compote, strawberry sorbet and chocolate-and-nuts-covered matzah brittle.
She’s also hedging her bets by keeping a small flock of chickens at her family’s farm, Stone’s Throw Farm, in Sagaponack, Long Island.
Others are turning to the array of egg-free recipes for traditional Jewish foods created in recent years amid an explosion in vegan and plant-based eating. There are “1001 ways to use egg replacements,” said Micah Siva, a dietitian and cookbook author who specializes in vegetarian Jewish food.
“When baking, I often rely on chia seeds as well as things like applesauce or if you feel comfortable, a silken tofu or even mashed potatoes if you need to bind something,” said Siva, whose book Nosh includes a recipe for a vegan matzah ball that has aquafaba — the liquid byproduct of canned beans, as an ingredient.
However, Ashkenazi Passover rules prohibit the use of beans, but Siva’s husband is a Sephardic Jew, and she has adopted his traditions.
Others are just planning to make concessions to reality. Chanie Apfelbaum, a cookbook author and food influencer under the handle “Busy in Brooklyn,” said she anticipates nixing the hard-boiled eggs she typically makes in bulk and throws in her bag for outings during the holiday with her five children. Matzah with nut butter will have to suffice.
Apfelbaum is also scouring her archives for recipes that are less egg-reliant, such as a Nutella tart with a macaroon crust. But she knows she’ll have at least one egg on the seder table.
“If there’s a shortage, there’s a shortage,” she said. “If it’s a cost thing, people will have to cut back on other things because eggs are an important part of the holiday. You need it for your seder plate. How do you get around that? Can we cut back on eggs? Yes. Can we say we are not going to use them? No.”
An egg is set on the seder plate, representing both the ancient Temple sacrifice. Beyond that, it is customary to place bowls of hard-boiled eggs on the seder table so each participant can dip one in salted water, to remind them of the tears and suffering of the Israelites in Egypt while retelling the story of their liberation.
Rabbi Levine said it is acceptable according to Jewish law to substitute any cooked meat for the egg on the plate, since it joins the shankbone as representations of the two sacrifices that during Passover in ancient Jerusalem.
For low-income Jews, the egg crisis is even more pressing. “I call them the poor person’s protein,” said Alexander Rappaport, executive director of the Masbia soup kitchen network in New York City. Eggs, he said, were “cheaper than any canned fish or frozen chicken.”
Surging prices have changed that, he said, at least for most of the year. “Eggs are a universal item. In the past, it was used as filler in a recipe. You could make tuna salad with cooked eggs for filler because the eggs were cheaper than the tuna. That doesn’t make sense [now] so people will adjust.”
But he’s not expecting any of his customers to go without eggs during Passover, when Masbia typically brings in two to three trailers of eggs — each holding 18,000 dozen — to use and distribute to its customers over Passover.
“We give anywhere from 15 to 30 dozen eggs per family for Passover,” Rapaport said. “Very large families of more than eight members might get more.
“In the observant world, eggs are synonymous with Passover, just like matzah.”
USDA predicts that prices will rise at least another 20% this year. Emily Metz, president and CEO of the American Egg Board, wrote last month, using an acronym for highly pathogenic avian influenza. “It’s going to take a sustained period with no additional HPAI detections on egg farms to stabilize supply.”
Passover programs like the one the Levine family is joining for the eight-day holiday have the advantage of scale. Entities buying in bulk can make use of egg brokers — middlemen in the industry who scour farms for available eggs on their clients’ behalf.
Even though Rachel Levine is sidestepping her own family’s Passover egg pressure, her anxiety about the crisis has her expecting to turn into something of an amateur egg broker herself.
“It’s not a joke!” she said about the crisis. “I told my sister-in-law that right after Purim I would start collecting eggs for her for Pesach. She has 11 kids and is hosting some family. I honestly don’t know how she’ll possibly have enough eggs.”
