Angry Calls Close Soup Kitchen : Topanga: Operators plan to resume the meals for laborers in two weeks or so. Residents, fearing transients might set brush fires, oppose the program.

Operators of a controversial soup kitchen in Topanga said Monday they will suspend service for two weeks or more after receiving angry phone calls from residents opposed to the free meals.

The group, People Assisting Topanga Canyon With Helping Hands, or PATCH, decided that discontinuing the midmorning meals until at least April 1 will also give them an opportunity to explain the difference between the several dozen day laborers they serve and the homeless who are of concern to residents.

“You don’t want to roll over on something like this,” said Susan Nissman, a PATCH volunteer, “and yet we need to take some time to try to inform people. The atmosphere now is just not safe.”

Nissman said in mid-February she received anonymous threats of violence over the telephone, “that I should be run out of town with the Mexicans. It’s very scary. I have children who go to school here.” She said other PATCH members had received similar calls, though none have been reported to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Last week, when the Topanga Christian Fellowship Church began allowing the group to use its parking lot to serve the soup, residents began calling the church to voice their complaints.

“We’ve been inundated with calls,” said the Rev. Joseph Caplan, the church’s pastor. “Emotions are very high. There was a lot of anger in the calls.”

Residents, fearful that transients might set brush fires endangering their homes, have called for the kitchen’s closing.

Caplan said callers mistakenly grouped the day laborers served by the soup kitchen with the homeless scattered in encampments throughout the canyons. In January, authorities said, a fire was set by a homeless person cooking on a makeshift stove. That led to a town meeting in which residents said the danger of more fires was too great to permit the soup kitchen to keep operating. From the beginning, however, PATCH members have drawn a distinction between the homeless and the day laborers.

“If you were to get rid of all the day laborers,” Nissman said, “you’d barely put a dent on the problem of the encampments.”

Caplan, who had granted PATCH temporary permission to use the parking lot, said church deacons will meet in early April to consider whether to allow PATCH to continue once the group seeks to resume. The group marked the first anniversary of the soup kitchen last week.

“I know from a biblical perspective,” Caplan said, “that we should feed the poor and needy, and it doesn’t say they have to be white or American citizens.”

Most day laborers served by the kitchen are refugees from Mexico or Central America who escaped poverty or war. They usually arrive in Topanga about 6 a.m. by bus or car and gather in front of the post office looking for work. If they haven’t found employment by noon, they often head home to Los Angeles. For many, the soup is their only source of food until they get home.

“That meal helps a lot,” said Fernando Mayen, 35. “It’s going to hurt people. The people who live in the camps are hurting everybody.”