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Donny Moss watched in horror as he said children stuffed dying chickens into hundreds of black garbage bags already stuffed full with feathery carcasses stained with blood.

"It was such a factory of throat slicing," said Moss. "What a grisly way to go."

The children were taking part in Kaporos, a Yom Kippur ritual performed by Hasidic Jews who believe their sins have been transferred into the body of a bird and that Moss says is a mass slaughter endangering the health of New Yorkers who are forced to foot the bill.

"NYPD provides security, the Department of Sanitation cleans it up," said Moss, one of many grassroots activists trying to get the city to crack down on the ceremony. "Taxpayers are underwriting the cost of this massacre and the city just turns a blind eye."

During the upcoming Kaporos, which is slated for mid-September, roughly 50,000 chickens will be killed in in the streets of Williamsburg, Crown Heights and Borough Park for the public sacrifice.

Participants say the ritual is a sacred element of Yom Kippur, a day of atonement, that many believe will protect their families in the new year to come.

"This is my substitute, this is my exchange, this is my atonement," participants will pray during the ritual. "This fowl will go to death, and I will enter upon a good and long life."

Williamsburg resident Joel Lubin told the New York Times that to him, the prayer meant, "If you're going to die during the year, maybe the chicken will die instead."

Yossi Ibrahim, 27, a Hasidic man from Crown Heights, said in an interview with the New York Post, "No one has the right to change our religion."

But some protesters worry about what happened in 2017, when hundreds of crates were stacked on the streets of Brooklyn in conditions Moss said caused thousands of the birds to die.

"They died on the streets with no food or water," said Moss, who has been protesting the "pop-up slaughterhouses" since 2010. "To die of hunger or thirst, to be surrounded by the bodies of others who have died?

"It's just so shocking that this happens in modern times."

Moss and his fellow activists want city agencies to enforce laws that forbid slaughterhouses being erected in residential areas and have mounted a pressure campaign against the Health Department and filed suit against the city. 

But they've been without much success, so far.

"We have not found Kaporos to be a significant public health threat," a city spokesperson said. "Our surveillance has shown no increase in illness — and this ritual is an important practice for some Orthodox Jews."

And lawsuit filed by protesters hit a hurdle last June when an appellate panel ruled 3-to-2 against them, the Daily News reported.

"The United States Supreme Court has recognized animal sacrifice as a religious sacrament," Justice Judith Gische wrote in her ruling, "although they may be upsetting to non-adherents of such practice."

That suit is now pending at the New York State Court of Appeals, according to Moss. 

Moss believes city officials are ignoring the ritual because of they fear backlash on Election Day, he said.

"They just don't want to touch this issue," said Moss. "This community is such a powerful voting bloc."

That won't stop him and hundreds of fellow protesters from taking to the streets of Brooklyn on Sept. 15, when the 2018 Kaporos is slated to start.

As members from the Hasidic community complete the ritual — which involves swinging a chicken overhead while repeating the prayer, then slitting the bird's throat in accordance with kosher law — Moss and fellow advocates from The Save Movement, Jewish Veg and United Poultry Concerns will pass water around to birds waiting in stacked crates. 

"It's gonna be bigger this year, a love-based approach," he said.

In the past they've tried holding up signs and pleading with the participants to stop, but with little success, Moss said.

"We haven't really gotten through to them," Moss admitted. "They think this is god wants them to do."