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Mostly Cloudy Five Towners, Bellmore-Merrick teachers offer hope on Thanksgiving
Through Rock and Wrap It Up, dozens of volunteers serve meal for those in need
Dozens of volunteers from the Five Towns and Bellmore-Merrick communities turned out on Thursday to help at Rock and Wrap It Up’s annual Thanksgiving feast at the First Congregational Church at Beach 94th Street in Rockaway Beach, Queens, which provides a hot meal of turkey and ham with all the trimmings to families in need.
The nonprofit global hunger-relief organization Rock and Wrap It Up, founded by longtime Cedarhurst resident Syd Mandelbaum, has sponsored the Thanksgiving meal each year for over a decade and a half.
For a number of years, the Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District has sent a contingent of phys. ed. teachers to volunteer at the event and has purchased turkeys and hams for the meal. Saul Lerner, the Central District’s athletic director and a Woodmere resident, is a board member of Rock and Wrap It Up, and he strongly encourages Central District teachers to donate time and resources to the organization, which collects surplus food from concession stands at rock concerts and professional sports games and “redistributes” it to soup kitchens and homeless shelters.
In 2009, the number of Americans living in poverty skyrocketed to 43.6 million, the most in 51 years, and the national poverty rate rose to 14.3 percent from 13.2 percent, according to data released recently by the U.S. Census Bureau. Mandelbaum said the poverty rate has only risen since then.
A number of the day’s patrons were homeless. Many others live in single-room-occupancies, or SROs, which are administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. They’re government-supported one-room apartments occupied by people who would otherwise be homeless.
