In the spirit of mishloach manot — sending gifts of food to friends at Purim — members of Oakland’s Temple Beth Abraham will celebrate the festival with a mitzvah.
Volunteers will personally deliver Purim baskets loaded with goodies to the home of every congregant and staff member after the synagogue’s Purim carnival on Sunday, Feb. 28.
Now in its fourth year, the holiday basket drive raises money for the Conservative synagogue’s Bet Sefer religious school and Gan Avraham preschool. Last year, Purim basket sales raised $7,000, said Deborah Sosebee, Beth Abraham’s vice president of administration.
Following another Purim tradition of matanot la’evyonim — giving gifts to the poor — the synagogue also donates 3 percent of the proceeds to Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger. Mazon funds food banks and other programs designed to eliminate hunger worldwide.
The fund-raiser is organized so that every congregant, family and staff person receives one Purim basket.
Congregants pay $5 to have their names inscribed on a gift card that accompanies a particular congregant’s basket. The cards for each basket lists all members who have made a donation in the recipient’s name.
One family, for example, might choose to sponsor a gift basket for 50 fellow congregants, contributing $250. Members designated more than once will receive one basket, although the synagogue collects $5 from each donating congregant.
The baskets include hamantashen, fruit, raisins, chocolate and a Purim grogger, as well as coupons for Peet’s coffee and Noah’s bagels. Most of the items are donated.
The fund-raiser “gets bigger every year,” Sosebee said. For the first two years, baskets were delivered only to members who had been selected by other congregants. But now each of the synagogue’s 300 households receives one.
The fund-raiser is the brainchild of Sosebee, a mother of three young children who borrowed the idea from East Coast synagogues. Recently, other East Bay synagogues, including Congregations Beth El and Beth Israel in Berkeley, have approached Sosebee about starting similar programs, she said.
The Purim basket drive is a “huge amount of work,” Sosebee said, which is why the synagogue does it only once a year. It requires 30 volunteers to assemble the baskets and another 35 to deliver them. While the volunteers drive to make the deliveries, their children actually bring the gift to the congregant’s front door because the fund-raiser is intended to benefit them.
“It’s a mitzvah,” Sosebee said.
Despite the hard work, she added, the Purim basket drive has become one of the synagogue’s most beloved events.
“This is the most community-building thing that our synagogue does. It’s so much more financially successful than we ever anticipated.”