School-wide Purim project

MICHELLE DODEK

Purim is a holiday that has something for everyone: parties, drinking, costumes, a good story, feasting and gift giving. As a religion of action, Judaism has ways to ensure the participation of the entire community in each festival. One mitzvah that Jews can fulfil on Purim is the giving of food baskets, called mishloach manot. With the Vancouver Hebrew Academy-led Jewish day school mishloach manot project, this is a mitzvah made easy.

For the past four years, Hodie Kahn has been running this project for VHA along with Aimee Promislow. This year, the Independent visited the packing effort, as the reins were passed to new project leaders, Rachel Sacks and Rachael Lewinski.

This project has become “a portal to bring the schools together in a positive way,” Kahn told the Independent. Giving a brief history of the program, she added, “Ruth Huberman started it 18 years ago … five years ago, Aimee and I became involved, and we found a website called happypurim.com that makes it much easier to order…. The goal was to make it bigger and reach out to different schools.”

When King David High School offered to let them use their building for what is now dubbed the “Pack-a-thon,” Kahn said the move finally streamlined the operation. “We used to pack hundreds of boxes in Ruth’s house and it was a three-week process,” she recalled. A couple of years after KDHS came on board, Kahn said Vancouver Tamud Torah approached her to be part of this community-wide project. Now Pack-a-thon participants package 1,300 boxes in just a few hours on one day.

Kahn helped facilitate the donation of the food for this year’s project through a relationship she has been building over the past few years. The manager of the Main Street Superstore, Remo Mastroprieri, was on hand at this year’s Pack-a-thon to receive an award for donating all of the kosher food.

Mastroprieri talked to the Independent about his involvement with the community. “I met with Hodie and she helped me understand the needs of the Jewish community. I’ve been sourcing items and bringing in new items over the past year,” he said, referring to the variety of frozen meats and other products now available in his store. “We’re like a test store for Western Canada and the response from the Jewish community has been great.”

Superstore’s donations made a big difference for the bottom line for this day-school fundraiser, said Kahn.

The mitzvah of mishloach manot is to give at least two different items of food to friends and neighbors in the spirit of the enjoyment of the festival. Sacks told the Independent she is pleased to be a part of something that brings positive energy and cooperation to the community. As more than 100 Grade 6 and 7 students from VHA and VTT engaged in the organized chaos of the Pack-a-thon on Feb. 14 in the KDHS auditorium, Sacks explained how many volunteers had been coordinated.

“One hundred and ten drivers have been lined up to deliver the mishloach manot, including deliveries to over 100 people in hospital, to the Louis Brier [Home and Hospital] and Weinberg [Residence],” she said. Students from Shalhevet Girls High School and Pacific Torah Institute will help with “shlepping” bags for the drivers whose routes span the Lower Mainland, she added.

While VTT had been running its own successful mishloach manot project for a number of years, Rabbi Matthew Bellas, the school’s head of Judaics, is convinced that combining efforts is the best way to impart a significant lesson to students. “There are three pillars in our strategic plan, and one of them is community,” he explained. “What better way to participate in the Jewish community than to join together with the other schools?

“Jewish education is the foundation for the community and participation in this project is sending a message to the students of their role in the Jewish community. It’s by doing that teaches them the most.”

The girls from VHA seem to have absorbed this lesson.

“I feel [the Pack-a-thon] is important because it brings out Jewish souls and makes people feel part of the Jewish community,” said Grade 6 student Abby Emmanuel.

Leora Rosenblatt, also in Grade 6, added, “It’s important because some people don’t have family and are lonely and if they get a gift, it makes them more pleasant to be around. It brightens their soul.”

While every family with a child in Jewish day school will receive a gift of mishloach manot whether they bought into the program themselves or not, Promislow said that many people outside of the day-school community will also receive mishloach manot. She anticipates that there will be some extra boxes, which will are available by contacting the VHA office at 604-266-1245.

Michelle Dodek is a freelance writer living in Vancouver.

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