For Seniors : Dishing Up Love, Offering Comfort to Those With AIDS

Even the prestigious Mayo Clinic Health Letter calls chicken soup an excellent remedy for “uncomplicated head colds and other viral respiratory infections.”

For those of us without a medical license to lose, we know it cures everything from the common cold to depression. But we also know it’s more than medicine: It’s love. Linda Greene makes great chicken soup and unabashedly declares, “I am a Jewish mother.”

Contrary to the stereotype of being overbearing, a Jewish mother’s real power is expressed in the kitchen, cooking for her family--and anyone else who happens to fall under her spell. That’s why Greene decided to express that power of love to people living with AIDS.

Five years ago the office administrator devised Project Chicken Soup, which once a month gathers volunteers to cook and deliver traditional Jewish hot meals to people with AIDS and HIV, the virus that causes the fatal disease.

She formed the group when, after losing several friends to AIDS, she found the Jewish community’s response to the disease lacking.

“I saw a lack of responsibility, as if, ‘It doesn’t happen to us, it happens to ‘them.’ I called the Gay and Lesbian Synagogue and invited some HIV people to my house for Passover. I felt it was the right thing to do even though I was treated as straight, in other words, not able to understand the gay world. That didn’t stop me from finding a place to connect,” she said.

The project covers the Westside, Hollywood and San Fernando Valley. Every meal includes chicken soup. The brochure reads: “If you’re Jewish and have HIV, a little chicken soup couldn’t hurt.” (You don’t have to be Jewish to get involved or to be served).

Greene creates the menu, supplies the recipes, gathers the ingredients, gets donations and cooks with the volunteers. “It’s a way to show that we care, and a way for people to connect with the Jewish community, though there are no restrictions on financial need or religious involvement,” she said.

To be in the group you just have to believe in the Jewish value of bikur cholim --the Hebrew term that loosely translates to active caring. It literally means visiting the sick.

And that is precisely what volunteers Mollie Pier and Ernest and Gerda Kohn do. For Pier, it’s very personal; her son died of AIDS four years ago. But for the Kohns it’s about leading a useful life.

The Kohns, both in their 80s, met in Palestine more than 50 years ago when they were members of the British army. Both escaped Nazi death camps by leaving Germany in the early ‘30s. They understand suffering. They also understand the value of compassion.

“We always brought chicken soup to sick friends. We should have a tanker filled with it in every neighborhood,” Ernest Kohn says.

Adds Gerda Kohn: “When we saw an ad for an involvement opportunity we called. Coincidentally, it was called Project Chicken Soup.”

Ernest Kohn wishes that more people would get involved in caring for people with AIDS. “None of our friends do it. They would have less problems to think about if they were active. So, you get a little slow. Cooking for people and delivering food speeds you up.”

The Kohns believe that people are misinformed about AIDS and that ignorance creates fear. But they never feel afraid. “Some people are friendly, some are so sick they just stretch out their hand and take the food. AIDS is AIDS--no limitation on age, financial status,” Gerda Kohn says.

(According to the National Institute on Aging, individuals older than 50 represent 10% of reported AIDS cases in the United States.)

The Kohns may not be doctors, but they believe in the healing powers of chicken soup. If bringing someone chicken soup interrupts the isolation that all sick people feel when their illness cuts them off from the world, who’s to say that isn’t part of some remedy?

Pier’s son, Nathaniel, was a doctor. He treated AIDS patients in his New York practice. “I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family where women were treated like second-class citizens. I educated myself. At first I thought of homosexuality as a sin, but when I found out my own son was gay I learned all that I could. I was hurt not because he was gay but because he was afraid to tell me. He was afraid of rejection and he visualized me as a square--a Jewish mother who could reject her son,” she recalled.

Nathaniel Pier died with loving people around him, and that impressed her. A volunteer all of her life, such activity took on a different role after her son’s death. In addition to Project Chicken Soup, she lectures on homophobia at the USC Andrus Gerontology Center and gives talks on the positive aspects of aging.

“No one goes through life unscathed and we have a lot to learn from one another. The key is education,” she says.

When Linda Greene launched Project Chicken Soup, she expected the Jewish community to say: “You’re right, we should take care of people with AIDS.” But now she’s lowered her expectations.

“I see there’s an acknowledgment, a little inroad, but the subject still makes people uncomfortable. But when I think about one of our clients who received a meal during Hanukkah (Festival of Lights) and how happy he was to connect once again to the familiar smells and tastes, I can only feel in my heart that we are doing the right thing. That’s why the Hebrew word for the project is nechama : comfort. For ourselves and for people living with AIDS.”

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Project Chicken Soup is part of the Jewish Family Service and the Los Angeles Jewish AIDS Services .