Free Kosher Food for the Hungry of All Faiths

In 1983 the founder of Zucky’s Delicatessen in Santa Monica burst indignantly into Jean Kaplow’s office at the Bay Cities Jewish Community Center.

“Look at all those hungry people on the street corners,” the late Hy Altman told Kaplow, the director of the center. “I don’t know how many are Jewish, but I bet there are a lot.”

Altman worried that many hungry Jews who observed kosher dietary laws had no place to go for food. He told Kaplow that he didn’t want to wait for bureaucratic government or private agencies to help.

Getting the Ball Rolling

“I want to feed them now,” he said.

On the golf course and elsewhere Altman wheedled support, including free use of a building. Meanwhile, Kaplow along with Altman’s wife, Zucky, and Westwood activist Toni Reinis lobbied their contacts for food.

Their prodding created SOVA, which opened its first site in July, 1983, and now uses three pantries to provide kosher food to Jews and non-Jews alike.

SOVA, which is Hebrew for “being satisfied by food,” will conduct its most ambitious campaign yet during the upcoming Jewish New Year observances, trying to raise 20 tons of food at local synagogues.

Rabbis will urge worshipers to bring shopping bags full of canned and packaged kosher food to services between the start of Rosh Hashanah at sundown today and the end of Yom Kippur at sundown Oct. 13.

The food will be distributed from pantries at 3007 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica; 7563 1/2 Beverly Blvd. in the Fairfax area, and 625 S. Taylor Ave., Ontario.

The Santa Monica location in an old, three-bedroom house caters to homeless people; the donated Ontario store in a junkyard serves Anglos and Latinos, while the Fairfax storefront feeds many elderly immigrant Russian Jews. Together, they serve about 450 people per week.

Volunteers staff all three locations. Almost all the food and much of the rent have been donated. The remainder of the food and rent has been paid with $32,000 in grants ($20,000 from the Jewish Federation Council; $12,000 federal) SOVA has received since 1983. When non-kosher food is received from donors, most of it is given to other food banks and some is given directly to clients.

At the Fairfax location, Russian and Yiddish murmurs filled the small waiting room on a recent morning as about 15 people, most of them wearing old clothes, sat on chairs along the walls. Many wore thick glasses or relied on walkers for support.

The site is open 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays, but clients began lining up outside more than an hour beforehand. When they entered they filled out a short intake card, told a volunteer what they needed and waited for a bag to be filled with groceries.

Many are homeless and get what is called walking food: tuna, crackers, peanut butter and other items that require no cooking.

Often the food is dispensed slowly because few on the all-volunteer staff speak Russian or Yiddish.

A man in a sport shirt and slacks who had waited quietly for an hour was called by a volunteer.

“Are you here for the first or second time?” the interviewer asked in English.

The man looked at her blankly.

“Do you speak Yiddish or Russian?” the interviewer asked.

“Yiddish,” the man said, relieved that he would be understood. The interviewer rephrased her question in Yiddish and the discussion proceeded.

The food is designed to last four days and no one is supposed to return more than twice, because within a week clients may become eligible for permanent aid, which volunteers often help them find.

Keeping It Quiet

But while Altman worked in the storeroom, a volunteer told her that a woman seeking food for the second time wanted to return again because she had no family and no other source of sustenance.

“All right, tell her to come back,” Altman said softly. “But tell her not to tell anybody that we’re letting her come back a third time.”

The gray-haired Altman, 67, said her husband was equally sympathetic to hungry people at his restaurant. He never turned a hungry person away.

In 1945, high school dropout Altman needed a business that would provide for his wife and brother, who had returned from World War II with severe emphysema. So Altman quit his job as a liquor salesman and in 1946 opened a delicatessen, facing the former pier at Pacific Ocean Park. He called the place Zucky’s after his wife, the former Wolfine Zuckerman, whose name he had once promised to put up in lights.

His wife, a model and dancer who had performed at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood with Marge Champion, joined him, cashiering and filling catering orders.

Large summer crowds thinned in the coolness of winter, however, and in the mid-1950s Altman decided to move to a busier spot in Santa Monica.

He told Santa Monica officials that he wanted to put in the most beautiful store in the city and built a spacious restaurant surrounded by burnt-orange Palos Verdes stone.

The night before the deli opened, Zucky Altman said, Santa Monica residents knocked on the windows and asked to be let in. Altman said he couldn’t because he wasn’t unpacked. They asked to come in and help.

Hy Altman started a pot boiling, cooked corned beef and made sandwiches and coffee for the temporary help all night. Zucky Altman said the helpers that evening formed the mainstay of their business.

After Hy Altman bought a home in Santa Monica and, later, in Pacific Palisades, he said everything he had came from a corned beef sandwich.

Continuing Involvement

Over the years he suffered three heart attacks, so he and his wife retired from the business in 1977 but continued their involvement with charities. When Hy Altman saw hungry people on television lined up for surplus government cheese, he brought his concern to Kaplow, now assistant executive director of the Jewish Community Centers Assn. of Greater Los Angeles.

The Santa Monica pantry opened a few months later on July 6, 1983, the Altmans’ 40th wedding anniversary, and now dispenses food from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Hy Altman died of a heart attack in 1985, but a year later his widow, Kaplow and Reinis established the Fairfax pantry. Both establishments were organized in conjunction with the Jewish Centers Assn.

Last fall students from the Claremont colleges contacted SOVA and started the Ontario site, which is open from 1 to 3 p.m. Tuesdays and Fridays.

Ten Tons Donated

A SOVA drive at local synagogues during the last Jewish New Year netted 10 tons of food, which fed about 100 people at the Santa Monica pantry for four months, Reinis said.

Local rabbis say it is fitting that synagogues try to exceed that goal this year.

Rabbi Allen Freehling of University Synagogue in Brentwood noted that observant Jews fast on Yom Kippur, which reminds them that “there are many hundreds of thousands of people in America today that are being forced by necessity to fast.”

Freehling also said that a biblical New Year’s reading from the prophet Isaiah challenges Jews to feed the hungry.

Speaking in Chapter 58 of the right kind of fast, Isaiah asks, “Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house?”