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Overcast His chessed comes from the heart
From his school years to fatherhood, Hewlett resident Gabriel Boxer has always been doing good, from chessed (the Hebrew word for kindness) projects as a youth in his native Hillcrest, Queens, to feeding essential workers during the coronavirus pandemic, to large giveaways to aid people in need.
Having learned from his parents about helping family and friends, and now aiming to instill those values in his children, Boxer, 41, created Kosher Response in March 2020, as the pandemic was shutting down most businesses, especially restaurants and other places that made their money selling food.
That charitable organization has morphed into one focusing on all who need help. Kosher Response also organized Feed A Family and Fuel A Restaurant (in which gift cards were given to those in need so they could get food with dignity and support local eateries), and partnered with the Marion & Aaron Gural JCC to provide food during the pandemic.
Boxer also got involved with the Leon Mayer Fund, and in tandem with Rabbi Simcha Lefkowitz, who oversees the fund, and his own Kosher Response, he operates the Mark Ramer Chessed Center, which is open to all and offers an assortment of items, from clothing to bicycles and housewares, to those in need. Boxer runs the fund’s day-to-day operation as a volunteer.
For all of these efforts, the Herald is proud to name Boxer its 2021 Person of the Year.
“I grew up in a house where we’d always tried to help out our fellow neighbors, our friends, our family, and then learning and doing from school and the local synagogue where I grew up in Queens,” Boxer said, sitting in an office at the Leon Mayer Fund building in Hewlett, which also houses the chessed center.
The fund, founded more than 30 years ago, has subsidized meals, offers financial assistance and helps with school placement and family issues.
“Then, when you get married and have children,” Boxer said, “you want to imbue that same doing-good into your children, and the best way of actually teaching them is actually by showing, not only by saying.” Boxer and his wife, Rebeka, have four children, Johnathan, 19, AnnaRuth, 16, Deena, 11, and EllaRosa, 6. Johnathan is currently in Israel, and the Boxer daughters all attend the Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway.
Boxer works for a firm that offers merchant cash advances to small businesses, and previously worked in the kosher food industry for caterers, manufacturing companies and supermarkets.
For a time he had his own catering business, and he is also known as the Kosher Guru, the name of a consulting business that he started roughly seven years ago after getting calls from startups asking for advice.
“With the advent of social media and Instagram, which I first resisted, after a year I said, I have to get in on this, and everyone has a fun name,” Boxer recalled. “Kosher Guru came to mind” — and took off on Instagram, becoming what Boxer called “a phenomenon.”
Its mission statement, he said, is, “Bringing anything and everything kosher with a kosher lifestyle in a fun-filled way.” “It’s more of a passion than a job,” he said.
Wanting to help at the height of the pandemic, he applied that passion to kicking off Kosher Response.
“I was sitting in my office [in Cedarhurst] and a friend of mine, Steve Weinrib, messaged me that one of his best friends” — Woodmere resident Daniel Haller — “is running the Covid unit at South Nassau” — now Mount Sinai South Nassau, in Oceanside — “is working 72 hours straight and hasn’t eaten anything,” Boxer recounted, noting that, at the time, most businesses were closed. “I ran down the block, went to a pizza shop” — Bogo Kosher Pizza in Cedarhurst — “bought about, I don’t remember what it was, seven pies and some other stuff and sides and ran out to South Nassau, called this doctor who I know from Woodmere and said, ‘I’m here.’ That was the very first Kosher Response act.”
After he posted on social media, Boxer said, many people responded with posts of appreciation, writing that they, too, would like to send food to family and friends who were working in local hospitals.
North Woodmere resident Miri Stern, a real estate agent who wasn’t selling any houses because of the shutdown, contacted Boxer and got involved.
“My house became a storage facility out of my garage,” Stern said. “I took care of the volunteers. I didn’t realize how big this was going to become — we got hundreds of responses in a day all over the tristate. “We were doing 15 to 20 deliveries a day. It became a full-time job.”
Kosher Response also used its social media presence to act as a matchmaker, posting a video that helped one woman find a husband.
And Stern recalled bringing dinner to a nurse at NYU Langone Hospital in Manhattan where she cried over the death of a 30-year-old Five Towns man. “That touches you,” said Stern, who is now Kosher Response’s vice president.
At a Hanukkah gift giveaway that Boxer organized a week before the Jewish holiday, Woodmere resident Bern Cohen, who has known Boxer for many years, was a volunteer. “Anything that Gabe is a part of, I want to be a part of as well,” Cohen said, “because everything he does is chessed-oriented. It’s always giving with a full heart.”
Boxer’s charitable works also included a food-distribution collaboration with the Gural JCC in 2020, which involved the Leon Mayer Fund and Community Chest South Shore. More than 3,000 people from the Five Towns, Oceanside, West Hempstead, Great Neck, Far Rockaway and other areas of Queens received food.
And as a volunteer coordinator for the JCC of Rockaway Peninsula, Boxer is involved with a number of projects. “We can write a book on Gabe,” said JCCRP Executive Director Moshe Brandsdorfer. “He has a huge heart — really cares about community members.”
The JCCRP partnered with Boxer on a school supply giveaway in September and the Hanukkah toy giveaway. “The JCCRP cherishes its partnership with the chessed center,” said Brandsdorfer, a North Woodmere resident, “[both] working together to help so many community members.”
