Helping those in need of food

Five Towns-based groups partner to feed people in need

Throughout its nearly 90-year existence, South Shore Community Chest has always emphasized assisting others and now during the Covid-19 pandemic, that is especially what the charitable organization is doing.

Right now, we’re centering our help around those who are unable to put food on the table.”

Trudi Haberman Community Chest South Shore vice president

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Throughout its nearly 90 years, Community Chest South Shore has focused on helping others, and now, during the Covid-19 pandemic, that continues to be the charitable organization’s mission.

Community Chest has teamed up with the Five Towns Community Center and the Marion & Aaron Gural JCC to help those in need. People can apply for the organization’s Neighbors Helping Neighbors program, which offers financial assistance to residents of the Five Towns and surrounding South Shore communities, and also take advantage of food assistance programs at the two centers.

“Over the years, we’ve helped those in need in many different ways,” said Trudi Haberman, who oversees Neighbors Helping Neighbors. “Right now we’re centering our help around those who are unable to put food on the table.”

Haberman noted that Community Chest does more than help clients at the Community Center and the JCC. “We’re here to help anybody in the community that needs help, but we have to go through another avenue to do so since we don’t have the expertise to vet someone,” she explained. “That’s why we’re working with the Community Center and the JCC.”

Founded in 1931 as the Community Chest of Hewlett, Woodmere, Cedarhurst, Lawrence and Inwood, the group was also known as Five Towns Community Chest before rebranding itself as Community Chest South Shore in 2016 to expand into more South Shore communities.

Its mission is to help other organizations and institutions. It also serves as an umbrella charity, raising money for the Five Towns Early Learning Center in Inwood.

Gural JCC Associate Executive Director Stacey Feldman said that the Rina Shkolnik Kosher Food Pantry, at the JCC’s Sustenance Hope Opportunities Place, or SHOP, in Cedarhurst, is taking phone orders and arranging for pickups and deliveries, since clients are not allowed in the SHOP.

“The JCC has been operating a kosher food pantry since 2005, and we will be there for the community as long as there is a need,” Feldman said. “JCC has been a partner of Community Chest South Shore for many years. We value that relationship, and appreciate all they do to help our neighbors in need.”

Brent Hill, the executive director of the Five Towns Community Center, explained the services being offered there. “We currently have food at the Community Center that has been donated by Rock and Wrap It Up! and others,” Hill said. “Our main focus is continuing to make sure that everyone has enough to eat.” Cedarhurst resident Syd Mandelbaum runs Rock and Wrap It Up! Hill added that the food pantry at St. Joachim’s Catholic Church, in Cedarhurst, donated 350 pounds of frozen pork patties.

Haberman said that feeding those in need would be Community Chest’s focus for the duration of the pandemic in Nassau County. “It’s heartbreaking for people to starve and have to worry about not having food on the table for their family,” she said. “It just breaks my heart.”

To contact the Gural JCC, email NIN@GuralJCC.org. Contact Hill at BHill@Fivetownsmail.org.