Mishpacha Magazine
February 14, 2007

By Gavriel Horan

The Hazon Yeshaya soup kitchen is the largest soup kitchen in Israel, feeding thousands of the neediest people daily throughout the country, as well as offering totally free job training, day care, and dental treatment.  The organization’s founder and director, Avraham Israel, speaks about the unbelievable growth of the Soup Kitchen since it’s founding over a decade ago, as well as his own humble beginnings.

The Gift of Giving - Beyond the Soup

“In Egypt in 1958, a Jew was literally a sitting duck,” Avraham Israel recounts.  When Nasser rose to power, countless Jews fled for their lives, seeking refuge wherever they could go, to avoid the wrath of the anti-Semitic dictator.  Among them was the young Avraham, then a boy of nine, who together with his family escaped to France.  The journey consisted of traversing the desert on camels, crossing the Mediterranean in an old Italian boat that nearly sank, and literally fearing for their lives at every border crossing until they arrived safely in Paris.  There, however their problems were not over—in Paris they were faced with a new set of problems: they knew no one, and had nothing, having left Egypt without anything but the clothes on their backs.  They remained in Paris for 3 1/2 years until visas were finally obtained to immigrate to America.  During those hard years however, they lived in abject poverty, but were able to survive due to the efforts of a certain Jewish soup kitchen.  The young Mr. Israel promised himself that when he was able, he would attempt to show his hakaras hatov to Hashem, by doing something to help the poverty stricken of the Jewish people.  After retiring from a successful export business 12 years ago, Mr. Israel moved to Israel with his family intent on committing his life to helping people.  He never had any idea how big it would get. 

It all started shortly after Reb Avraham arrived in Eretz Yisrael.  A woman with multiple sclerosis asked him to help her cross the street to go to her house.  When he opened up the door to her apartment he was shocked by what he saw: she was living in barely livable conditions.  “I came to Israel during my business career 50 or 60 times but I stayed in 5 star hotels and went to the kotel or Ein Gedi when I had the chance,” Mr. Israel explained.  “I never saw this kind of poverty, one room full of nothingness.”  The first thing that came to his mind was what this woman was going to eat.  He saw that she had no refrigerator, no electricity, and a broken sink with a garbage can to catch the runoff.  She said that by the end of the day she hopes to find a yogurt.  He asked if there was anyone else she knew living like this.  “My neighbor,” she replied matter of factly.  A family of 6 living in one room with mattresses stacked against the wall.  At night they would flop the mattresses onto the floor and sleep.  They also didn’t have any food.  And these are the best cases—the list got worse and worse the more he inquired.  Mr. Israel saw this as his opportunity to give back to Hashem for the chesed he was shown as a child, so he proceeded to rent out a storefront on Rechov Rashi with his own funds and hired an elderly lady to cook and started making meals for poor people in the neighborhood.  It started out with 17 people a day but quickly by word of mouth from one to another the numbers began to grow.  17 became 50, 50 became 100, until today they are feeding over 7500 people a day all over Israel, with more than 12,000 daily expected by the end of the year, totally almost 4 ½ million meals a year.

“A person can survive almost everything, even holes in clothes,” Mr. Israel recounts.  “When we were in France those three years, my pants got shorter as I got taller and it was quite embarrassing—but I survived.  Food on the other hand, you have to eat every day.  That is why I picked this work, because this is the most basic form of sustenance.  But I never dreamt it would get this big—I thought that 17 people would be my payback to society, my hakarat hatov—you know if you and him, and Moshe, and Eliayahu and everybody would take care of 17 people this world would be fantastic.  So I thought that was it, but Hashem has His plans, rabot machshavot b’lev eish, v’atzot Hashem he takum.”

Hazon Yeshaya has four main distribution centers throughout Israel including one in Elat (I was surprised to hear that believe it or not the poverty in Elat is tremendous) with an additional 38 pick up centers all over the country, soon to become 60.  A center was opened in Ashkelon after an Israeli television show depicted children in a local school there, who were watching other children eat their lunch while they themselves were without food.  The reporter asked the children why they were not eating.  The children responded that they didn’t have any food.  “How are you going to eat?” the reporter asked.  “We hope by the end of the day to find some pieces of bread,” was the children’s response.  The reporter asked if they were able to concentrate in school.  “No,” was the reply, “we are to busy thinking about where we will find those pieces.”

“The situation in Israel is horrible,” Mr. Israel explained.  “Nobody is doing anything about the poverty.  I am getting people all across the board, all sorts of people that you wouldn’t believe--people who had it and lost it, lo aleinu, people who can’t work or lost their jobs, holocaust survivors etc. and our services are needed more than ever.  The people I feed are of all ages and from all over the world.  We don’t discriminate, chas v’sholom.”  The poverty in Israel is tremendous with over a million and a half people below the poverty line, totaling more than ¼ of the population.  Even more than 30% of these numbers are made up of children.  A religious school in Jerusalem that had been provided with government meals for all 340 kids was suddenly cut without any warning.  Worst of all, for many of these kids, this meal was their only meal of the day.  The principle of the school called Mr. Israel who went right over.  He walked into the lunchroom to see 340 kids eating pieces of stale bread and water.  “I say sarcastically, that this is why our business is growing so quickly.  Even the schools that were lucky enough to get food were abruptly cut.  Our children jump when they see toys, when they see food they don’t jump.  These kids, when they see food, they jump.”

After a boy in his son’s class in Yeshiva fainted from a toothache that he had been plagued with for over a month, Mr. Israel decided to open a free dental clinic.  In addition to this, Hazon Yeshaya offers several job-training courses in hair styling, cosmetics, computers, book keeping, secretarial, and cooking all completely free of all tuition costs for students.  Several of the courses are available solely to chareidim to help to better the situation in the Israeli frum community.  “I am trying to get as many people as possible out of this situation,” he says.  As the Rambam explains, the highest form of charity is helping someone to become financially independent.  This is the only school in Israel that gives job training completely for free.  Hazon Yeshaya works hand in hand with the Israeli government even though they do not receive any government funding.  The Government not only directs them as to what courses to offer in order to provide the best job options but also gives graduates a government of Israel diploma.  “It’s beautiful to teach a person a trade but the main goal is not to have a diploma but to have a job.  My diploma from Hazon Yeshaya isn’t worth so much.  The state of Israel diploma on the other hand, is recognized even in America.”  Hazon Yeshaya tries to help each age group in different ways: children are provided with lunch in school to keep them in education so that they can rise above their parent’s economic position, the elderly are given good food to help make their lives more comfortable, and the middle aged are given job training.  The only prerequisite for recipients is that they need to provide proof that they are in need.Hazon Yeshaya will only assist those who are registered with the government as status “Aleph,” meaning the poorest of the poor.  The list goes from Aleph to Heh: “Heh, G-d bless them, they are millionaires,” Mr. Israel explains.  “Aleph--the only one’s worse off are in the grave.”   A volunteer from Brazil comes every day to help.  She says that she thought poverty was at its worse in Sao Paulo until she came to Israel.  She never before saw conditions like these before.

The massive operation is almost entirely manned by volunteers.  There are 7 paid staff to run the entire organization in addition to one chef per center, and teachers.  Most of the dentists are also on a volunteer basis, and each day there are between 40-120 volunteers in the kitchen in Jerusalem alone.  Mr. Israel himself doesn’t take a salary yet he works nearly 20 hours a day.   He was embarrassed to tell me that he doesn’t even daven netz, he davens in the earliest minion possible, called the minion of the poalim, the laborers minion, before sunrise.  He arrives at the office at 6:30 in the morning and stays until the late hours of the night and spends months each year fundraising abroad.  “I give the credit to my wife—it’s not easy,” he said.  He tried to find someone to replace him with the fundraising but they wanted too much money.  “Who else can I find to do it?” he asked.  The soup kitchen is open 365 days a year, including Yom Kippur for the sick and elderly, on Pesach they delivered 14,570 kosher l’mehadrin food packages to families, and it is equipped with a large sukkah during Sukkos.  It takes a few inches of snow to paralyze the state of Israel, not like the type of blizzard needed to shut down New York or Chicago.  A few years ago Jerusalem was hit with a snowstorm that shut the entire city down.  Hazon Yeshaya was the only soup kitchen open that day, with volunteers trekking through the snow on foot to deliver the meals.  During last summer’s war in Lebanon, Hazon Yeshaya increased its meal total by 4000 extra meals per day to assist both refugee families who had fled the north as well as those unfortunate enough to have stayed behind in bomb shelters.

 “It’s unbelievable,” Mr. Israel says.  “The entire organization runs like clockwork.  My accounting background helps, I’m good with numbers.  I run it like a business, as if it was my import business, but it’s a non-profit.  He showed me around the building complex as excited as a little child.  Before opening the door to the hair dressing salon, or the dental clinic, or the computer lab, or the day care center he would say, “I am jumping for joy about this new program.”  On the top floor he brought me to a door and said “open it yourself, you won’t believe what you are about to see.”  I opened the door to find a gigantic shul full of what seemed to be around 200 kollelites learning Torah with great fervor.  Mr. Israel inherited a kolel a few years back that was about to be shut down due to lack of funds.  His elderly mother, a”h, donated enough money to keep it open for another 2 months.  After that Mr. Israel was able to find enough donors to build it up and it has since grown into one of the best kollels in Jerusalem.  One room after another was full of excited children.  The day care facilities are expected to house 1000 religious children daily within the next 3 years.  Across the street they also have a girls’ school with 150 students.

The Joy of Giving

When I visited, the kitchen was full of about 50 college age students from England on an Aish HaTorah Fellowship program.  They were working with tremendous excitement, serving heaping platefuls of chicken, pasta, and corn.  For many people, this is their only meal of the day, so it needs to be rich, consisting of bread, salads, soup, meat, starches, and drinks.  Every day is fresh because they don’t have any leftovers.  Eighty percent of the food is shipped out to schools and homes, hundreds of meals are picked up, and over 150 people eat there daily.  The line was wrapping around the courtyard, full mainly of elderly people.  The volunteers consist of anyone from top secret air force units, to birthright groups, yeshivas, and seminaries.  The day before I came, there were 75 soldiers who spent the morning working in the kitchen.  I spoke to the organizer of the Fellowship program, Moshe Meirfeld who told me that he brings every trip that he organizes to the soup kitchen for a day of volunteering.  “It’s amazing to actually see the reaction of the recipients immediately as you’re doing it.  You see the people’s faces light up when you give them a hot meal.  The results of chesed are incredibly empowering and impacting on the students who are here in Israel for the first time.  They see the value of chesed, seeing beyond themselves.  Anyone of these students’ shirts could probably feed a lot of these people for a week.  They come here and they see what’s going on at the soup kitchen and the impact that they can have on people’s lives; they become aware of needs beyond their own and realize that people are really needy and they’re able to go beyond themselves and really make a difference—this is really in many ways the foundation of Yiddishkeit.”  One of the students from London commented on his experience: “on this trip that we have been privileged to go on, we have been spoiled by so much which we got absolutely free.  Coming here you see people give to others and you are given the opportunity to get the joy of giving.  We come from London, from one of the most developed countries in the world and we don’t have an infrastructure like this.  A soup kitchen in London means a bowl of soup--it doesn’t mean soup, chicken, corn, and so on, so I’m really amazed to see how sophisticated they are here and how much effort goes in.”

How Has HazonYeshaya Become So Successful?

“We do everything quietly we don’t advertise,” Mr. Israel says.  “Hakodosh Barchu knows there’s no need to advertise.  If I didn’t want it to grow, I could have stopped fundraising 5 years ago and it would have supported itself from donors who fell in love with what we do.  People like what we do because it is run like a business.  I am using my experience in business—I am saying it in modesty, I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but experience enhances the chance of success and if you have mazal with Hakodosh Barchu you have a success story. If I felt that there was anything more important than this in the world that I should do I would drop this and do it--I’m not tied.  But there is nothing more important—what is more important than helping people that are yearning for the most basic human necessity, feeding a little kid, or a guy who suffered 60 years ago in the holocaust.  The Gemorra in Kesubos says that the prayers of Mar Ukva’s wife were answered before his.  The Gemorra explains that whereas he only gave money to poor people with which to buy food, she had a greater merit because she gave them already cooked meals.  Giving a cooked meal is the greatest chesed.  I could have taken the easiest way and given a food package once a week, but if we’re gonna do it, we do it the right way, we do it all the way, or we don’t do it at all.  That’s it.”

He told a story about a woman who once came into his office crying that the kitchen staff wouldn’t give her a meal.  He was in the middle of speaking to some potential donors so he was quite embarrassed by the event.  He rushed into the kitchen and demanded that she be given a meal.  The volunteer in the kitchen apologized for not serving her, “I’m sorry Mr. Israel, if you want we can give her 20 meals, but don’t you want us to check each person out?  We found out that this woman is a millionaire!”  He has hundreds of stories like this a year.  “It’s a sickness people have, that they want to get something for free,” he said.  “Some people tell me, ‘Avraham, we disagree with you.  If a person comes to your soup kitchen give them a meal!’  I answer them very simply, ‘nothing in this world is harder than when a mother and her children tagging along comes to the kitchen at the end of the day at 5’oclock after we have finished and the kitchen is spotless, and she begs us for food, and we have nothing left.  When we are able to feed the hundreds of thousands of children in Israel who are not eating at home and who are surviving on only one meal a day, when we have covered everybody, then I will agree to that policy, open the door, col dichvin, whoever is hungry come and eat.  But we are so far away; we have people who are dying for that one meal.  How can we not take the responsibility to check the person to make sure he is in need?  We also have a responsibility to the donor.  Do you want me to use your money to feed someone who doesn’t really need it?  Of course not, that’s why we do it.  It’s a lot of work.  We do it every six months to make sure their status hasn’t changed.  We only feed the poorest people.”

Dollars and Cents

Mr. Israel showed me a letter he wrote to a lawyer representing a major donor.  The donor expressed concern after reviewing several of the soup kitchen’s invoices that showed that they are spending extra money in order to buy only the best chassidish hechsharim.  The donor wanted to know if it wouldn’t make sense for the soup kitchen to instead purchase another less expensive mehadrin heksher that would be more economical and would allow the kitchen to feed even more people for the same price.  In many cases the heksher is double the price of the other ones.  Mr. Israel responded that in order to make the soup kitchen available to everyone in need, including the most stringent people for whom eating another heksher would be tantamount to eating non kosher, he must rely on only the best koshrut standards.  “Nobody in the world concerns themselves about watching costs as I do.  The proof is our extremely low overheads,” he wrote.  “You have seen my offices that do not even possess any air conditioners.  I do not have a company car.  The drinking water is billed to my house.  I don’t even take a salary.  However I think you will agree, that when we are dealing with recipients who are receiving their only meal for the day, I think we should at least make sure that everyone is able to eat and enjoy.” 

“Not everything is dollars and cents,” he said.  “Pray for me that the donor will understand.”