After 30 years community pantry needs a new home

By Leon Cohen
of The Chronicle staff

As the Jewish Community Pantry completes its 30th year, it may find itself sharing a condition of many impoverished people — homelessness.

This only Jewish presence in the Milwaukee-area Hunger Task Force’s Emergency Feeding Organizations has been working out of a building on Villard Ave. and 34th St. for the past few years, perhaps the sixth site it has used for distribution in its history, said Dorene Paley.

Paley is director of community services at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center. Her job includes coordinating the pantry, which she has done for the past 18 years.

In that capacity, she works with Howard Karsh, current chair of the panty. Karsh was the JCC staff member who helped create it in 1976 and has been a volunteer worker for it since he left the JCC in 1989.
And in telephone interviews with The Chronicle, both said that the building on Villard is slated for demolition.

Moreover, added Karsh, finding a new site from which to carry out the pantry’s work — distributing food to people who need it — “has been our biggest single need over the years.”

“Landlords, even if we are willing to pay rent, don’t see this as a productive unit,” said Karsh. “They don’t want the poor hanging around the building.”

Despite its traveling existence, the Jewish Community Pantry has done work of which its officials and creators are proud. Paley said that the pantry at present serves more than 10,000 people a year, of whom 40 percent are children under 18.

Or as JCC president Jay R. Roth said, the pantry “provides a really important base of support for not only Jewish families, but it is one of the most important representations of the Jewish community in the larger community in helping people truly in need.”

Of the clients, about three to four percent are Jewish, said Paley; and Karsh added that most of them are elderly Russian immigrants.

Paley also said that this pantry is the only Hunger Task Force affiliated pantry that provides kosher food upon request. Indeed, it has a separate room and refrigerator dedicated to kosher food, she said.

Remarkable volunteers

Its leaders are also proud of the “remarkable group of volunteers,” as Karsh put it, that has worked and continues to work for the pantry. Some have served the organization for decades.

Rita Marcuvitz, for one, has worked for the pantry since its inception. In a telephone interview, she explained that she heard about the project at a meeting of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Women’s Division, which originated the project in cooperation with the JCC.

“I thought it was something I would like to do,” said Marcuvitz. “I like dealing with food and people; and why not?”

And since the pantry is open for service only one day a week — Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., except for holidays, “national and Jewish,” according to Paley — “it just fit into my schedule and lifestyle,” said Marcuvitz.

But Marcuvitz has stayed with the pantry all these years partly out of tenacity — “When I start something, I like to stick to it until completion” — and because she has found the work fulfilling.

“Everybody needs to eat. If you don’t have food, your life is very hard,” Marcuvitz said. “The best moments are when you give a package to someone you can tell is genuinely in need and they are genuinely grateful.”

But the pantry is not just struggling to find a new location. It also has financial problems with which to contend.

Roth said that its total budget is $114,590 — of which the largest expenditure is for food. Neither the JCC nor the Milwaukee Jewish Federation allocates funds to it. It is supported from private donations and from a JCC endowment left by an anonymous donor, Roth said.

However, “the contributions have been diminishing,” and the pantry has had to “dip into the principal of the endowment,” Roth said. And the pantry cannot keep doing that or it will be “out of business in two years,” Roth said.

In fact, donors in the Jewish community don’t appear to be as aware of the pantry as they once were, said Paley. That situation apparently was different when the pantry was founded.

Karsh said the process of creating the pantry began when Rabbi Francis Barry Silberg, then spiritual leader of Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun, encouraged the JCC and the Women’s Division “to determine if there was a need for a Jewish presence” in the local emergency pantry network and if there were Jews who needed emergency food who were going to other pantries in the community.

Karsh and Lotta Brafman of the Women’s Division recommended that such a presence should be created and support for it should be sought in the community. Karsh said that the community responded enthusiastically then.

So the pantry was set up. It first operated out of the Beth Am Center, a building on 55th St. and Burleigh St. that the Milwaukee Jewish Federation owned.

However, “Everybody believed 30 years ago that it would be a temporary situation,” and that the pantry “would not be in business very long,” said Karsh.

Since then a harsh reality has become clear. “Nobody believes any more that there’s the will within the government, state and federal, to eliminate the need for pantries,” said Karsh.

So, said Paley, “now that we know we are not going out of business, we may as well plan for the future. What a shame, huh?”

And the pantry has taken steps to do that. For one, the JCC, the federation and the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations recently have established an advisory board for the pantry.

And, Paley said, “We may combine [planning] with some kind of celebration.” However, “the needs are so great that we don’t want to use our resources for any other purpose.”

But there is no doubt among the organizers and volunteers about one thing. As Karsh said, “We are convinced after 30 years that this is a rightful place for the Jewish community to be.”

For more information about the Jewish Community Pantry, contact Paley at the JCC, 414-967-8217.