By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
Everyone has experienced hunger. Wake up in the morning and you’re hungry, so you go to the kitchen. Nothing to eat? Then a trip to the store is in order. Problem solved.
For about a thousand Seattle-area families a month, “nothing to eat” is more than just a phrase. For them hunger, or the threat of it, is a daily reality and the place many go to restock their shelves is the Jewish Family Service food banks in Seattle and Bellevue.
Keeping those shelves stocked requires constant effort. One way they do it is their annual High Holidays food drive, followed by a big sorting event which this year takes place on Sunday, September 23.
The timing is not just coincidental — in preparation for the High Holidays we read Parshat Shekalim, focusing on the first necessary step to achieve personal redemption — charity. The sages go so far as to say that charitable giving is “equal to all other mitzvot combined!”
The coins dropped into a tzedakah box, or a pledge to the Federation or another charity, have the power to sanctify the giver. And this time, when people are deemed to be closer to God than at any other time of the year, is also the time to evaluate how we treat others, especially those among us who have the least.
“This is an all-temple drive that’s done throughout the High Holy Days,” says Ray Extract, chair of Temple B’nai Torah’s Social Action Committee. “We give out bags at Rosh Hashanah and they fill then and bring them back at Yom Kippur. We rent a very large truck and I guess we are able to fill it,” he adds, noting that this is his first year in the state and his first food drive.
Volunteers from B’nai Torah will accompany the truck to the Acme Food Service warehouse on the following Sunday to unload the truck and possibly stay on to help sort.
Temple B’nai Torah is just one of a number of Jewish congregations and groups taking part in the annual food drive and sort. Each year at this time, at synagogues throughout the area, people fill grocery bags with canned goods and dry foods like rice and flour and bring them to High Holiday services. JFS volunteer coordinator Jane Deer-Hileman says four or five Conservative and Reform congregations, as well as the Secular Jewish Circle, have provided the backbone of the program over the decade it has been a regular event, though she has been reaching out to bring as many segments of the community together for this effort as possible.
“Orthodox congregations are involved,” she says. “J Connect and Hillel and the Jewish fraternities have come with groups. This year Temple De Hirsch Sinai is sending one of their groups — middle school kids, I think. There are going to be some high school students from Sephardic Sunday School and, hopefully, Northwest Yeshiva [High School] is going to send some of their high school students.
“This year,” Hileman says, “I’m going to do some outreach to Seattle Works to see of some of the Seattle Works volunteers — young adult volunteers in their 20s and 30s — might want to come because they’re looking for community volunteer projects and we serve both the Jewish and non-Jewish communities, so why not?”
Once the food is brought to the warehouse space, JFS emergency services director Carol Mullin says it gets put out on 20-foot-long tables where teams of volunteers sort it by type.
The warehouse space has been donated by community members Dean Polik and Valerie Polik, who have also contributed about several hundred pounds of food from Acme Food Service, as part of Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative Congregation’s contribution to the food drive.
Mullin says JFS anticipates receiving and sorting through 30,000 pounds of food in the one day, enough to supply a majority of what the food bank gives to its clients for the next four months. Food Bank manager Derek Wertz estimates the food collected over the holidays will make up around 15 to 30 percent of their total for the year.
“We don’t solely rely on the food drive,” says Mullin, “just because the logistics of bringing the food over here is fairly complex, so we continue to receive our regular sources of food, which come from Food Lifeline, Northwest Harvest and food that we purchase, although we actually purchase much less food during the food-drive months.”
Mullin says the sort brings in about 200 volunteers over the course of the morning and afternoon.
Hileman, who coordinates the actual sorting party, says for both security and logistical reasons, volunteers need to sign up in advance. But, she says, if people hear about the event at the last minute and want to come help on September 23, they can call her and make arrangements even on the day of the sort.
“I’ll be there at 8:30 Sunday morning,” she says.
Sarah Hopkins, a member of the Secular Jewish Circle of Puget Sound, is helping coordinate her group’s donation and volunteer force. She says they are counting on beween 60 and 75 volunteers: Sunday school students and their parents, members of their B’nai Mitzvah group fulfilling their mitzvah project responsibilities, and others.
“I really enjoy it,” Hopkins says, “especially the food sort coinciding with the High Holidays. It’s a very nice way to act on the kind of things we reflect upon during the High Holidays, in terms of what kind of a year have I had and what kind of a person have I been? And what kind of a person do I want to be, and what is my responsibility to people other than myself? It allows me to do that and allows me to model that for my children and to, really in a very easy way, to bring them to a community service event.”