jerusalem | An Israeli organization devoted to feeding the needy is updating a biblical concept as it goes about its mission.
“With Pesach just ahead, we’re gearing up our gleaning operation,” says Joseph Gitler, founder of Table to Table, Israel’s leading food rescue organization. “We’re signing up new farms every day. Yesterday a farmer offered one tomato field now and said he’d have another in about a month, which is perfect timing, because during the holidays — and Pesach in particular — there’s always a huge demand for donated food.”
The precept is spelled out clearly in Deuteronomy 24:19-22, where the Israelites are ordered to leave behind unharvested food and grain in the field for “the stranger, the orphan and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all your undertakings.”
Through Table to Table, a nonprofit organization based in the city of Ra’anana, volunteer gleaners from all over the country come to designated farms and cull excess fruit or vegetables. Drivers then pick up the food packages and deliver them to food service agencies that staff the nation’s soup kitchens, school systems serving needy children, the elderly and agencies that distribute food boxes for the holidays.
Table to Table added gleaning to its food rescue services just before Chanukah. Already, volunteer pickers have harvested more than 50 tons of clementines and 13 tons of persimmons. Gleaned foods include citrus fruits, potatoes, carrots and other vegetables.
The group’s regular operations began three years ago, when Gitler, then a 28-year-old immigrant from New York, went to a bar mitzvah. He noticed that perfectly good leftover food was being thrown away, while at the same time, people in the streets outside were hungry.
He realized that it would make sense to match the extra food with the hungry people. “Why not rescue the leftover untouched, unserved, food and bring it to soup kitchens so it can be used to feed the hungry?” he remembers thinking.
There are organizations in other parts of the world including an American organization also called Table to Table — that also redistribute food to the needy.
With his wife’s encouragement, Gitler began to spend many evenings collecting excess food in his own car and delivering it to food charities.
As Gitler’s nighttime activities became known, others began volunteering for him.
“Now over 500 people volunteer in our evening food pickups from locations all across the country,” Gitler says. Table to Table also employs six workers; three of them part-time.
Now, says gleaner Helene Mittman, who made aliyah from Brooklyn 13 years ago and lives in Zur Yigal, near Ra’anana, “It’s not just fruit. We pick vegetables, too. Every Tuesday morning I go to a packing shed and spend an hour picking potatoes, selecting the ones we can use from a huge bin.”
“Gleaning is great for someone like me,” explains Mittman. “I’m a stay-at-home mom with three teenagers and one younger kid, and I have time in the mornings. The physical labor is great — helps me work off stress. And it’s fulfilling to help feed people who are hungry.”
“We work with anyone who shows up to glean,” Gitler says. “We don’t necessarily get their names, and we don’t ask anyone for their family background. The truth is, we don’t always know which people, within which groups, are immigrants, and which are sabras.” Hunger manifests itself differently in Israel than it does in less developed parts of the world, Swartz says.
Information: www.tabletotable.org.il.