If there’s anything that characterizes our community, it’s food—Freshly fried mazzas, buttery sambousak, lemony hamud. Close your eyes and imagine what the Shabbat table looks like, or the smell of your house on a Thursday evening (fried onion and mujedra). Cuisine is so engrained in our identity and culture that we don’t always register what a luxury it is. Yet, for hundreds in our community nightly dinner, let alone a holiday meal, is a source of incredible stress and anxiety.
Sixteen hundred meals was the number to hit. In only a few short weeks our goal was to cook, package and deliver both meat and dairy dishes to over 165 families for every meal of the High Holidays. From the berachot of the first night of Rosh Hashanah until the final lunch of Simchat Torah, the team was dedicated to ensuring that not one table in the community was empty.
During the initial strategy meetings, the team decided on the name Tizku Le’Mitzvot Holiday Meals Project, as an expression of gratitude, both for ourselves and volunteers. Summers are usually the busiest time of year for our volunteers, yet with health restrictions certain precautions were put in place limiting the number of opportunities. This new and ambitious project gave us the ability to both help those in need and engage our phenomenal volunteer base.
Within a matter of days, volunteer coordinators, along with a few key volunteers went to work recruiting cooks, while on a development side the team began approaching donors to help move the project along. And by the first week of September, 250 cooks signed up to volunteer their culinary skills, while over 20 donors stepped up to help accomplish this incredible goal. It felt as if our volunteers had been holding their breath since the summer and were ready to jump into action the moment an opportunity presented itself.
One of the critical objectives of the Holiday Meals Project was to create a sense of warmth and familiarity with every dish. The menus included Friday night staples like roast, kibbeh, peas and mechsie, along with dairy dishes, like spanach, kusa jibin, calsones and more. The team wanted to ensure that every individual receiving meals was comforted not only because each dish was home-made, but because they were classic Syrian staples. From every mechshie filled to calsones stuffed, the cooks prepared each meal as if they were cooking for their own family.
The outpouring of support and volunteers were both heartwarming and overwhelming. Ultimately, our cooks prepared over 2,400 holiday meals, far surpassing our original goal, ensuring every mouth would be fed during the holidays. Throughout the month, we had volunteers organizing, boxing and delivering the thousands of meals in both Brooklyn and New Jersey. Ultimately, not only were we able to feed hundreds in the community, but we had the opportunity to empower our volunteers through acts of hesed and giving.
Once again, we must express our gratitude to every volunteer who opened their homes and hearts to reach our goal, to our community butchers who were beyond generous and every donor who helped this project come to fruition.
If you want to get involved at the pantry contact food@sbhonline.org.
