Call it the case of the missing chickens. At least, that’s what some recipients of Rosh Hashanah food packages from Maot Chitim of Greater Chicago might have been thinking.

There is an explanation for the chicken-less boxes, one that Audrey Lane Schiff, Maot Chitim’s executive director, wants to make sure the Chicago Jewish community knows about.

The trucking company delivering the birds -- destined for Rosh Hashanah meals for economically disadvantaged Jews -- was experiencing problems. So instead of arriving early in the morning on Sunday, Aug. 29, the truck with the chickens didn’t show up at the Maot Chitim warehouse until noon.

Problem was an army of volunteer packers and drivers had to start making the deliveries, Schiff explained in a phone conversation. "The boxes had to go out without the chickens," she said. "We wouldn’t have been able to get enough volunteers to make another delivery" if they had waited until the chickens showed up.

Schiff said this is the first time anyone can remember such a thing happening in the organization’s 100-year-plus history.

Maot Chitim is a volunteer agency that provides Passover and Rosh Hashanah food packages to needy Jews.

"We didn’t want the families to be without the chickens, so we decided to send checks to all 4,800 recipients to allow them to buy their own chickens," Schiff said.

The hen disaster happened on top of another unfortunate circumstance. Because of the recent salmonella outbreak and recall of millions of eggs, Maot Chitim decided not to put eggs in this year’s packages. A letter in each box explained the reason for the omission.

"But eggs aren’t really a staple" of High Holiday meals, Schiff said. "Chicken is what gives people their holiday meal."

Sending out checks to each recipient "was a great challenge," she said. "It involved hundreds of man-hours. There was a crew signing the checks and stuffing the envelopes. We wrote a letter in Russian and English to explain what was going on. It’s been a monumental task to do in less than a week. We appreciate the community support. We couldn’t do it without our volunteers."

The checks -- $7 per chicken, with larger families receiving a proportionately larger amount -- got out in the mail the Friday before Rosh Hashanah so people could do their holiday shopping in time.

Schiff said she is currently in negotiations with the trucking company and seeing what arrangements can be made to cover expenses. But her main concern right now, she said, is not with money, but in making sure the community understands what happened.

"We’ve gotten a lot of calls saying it’s terrible you didn’t give people chickens, and we want everyone to know we are doing the best we can," she said. "We want the community to know we feel awful about what happened, and we are doing our best to accommodate our recipients during the holidays."