Every Sunday night Kass & Kimelman fill the cart for Leket

Herzliya’s Seven Stars Mall starts to dim its lights, shops begin to close, and fewer and fewer people are strolling at a leisurely pace or window shopping. Whoever is still in the multi-level building is hurrying along the wide corridors to the elevators or escalators, carrying their shopping bags, on their way out to the parking lot. Sound has diminished and movement has almost halted. But as for me and my partner, Rebecca, we’re just getting started.

Late at night, once a week, we push an empty supermarket shopping cart and make the rounds of the cafes and fast food locations in the mall. We’ve done this for almost a year, so many of the servers know us and recognize our Leket t-shirts. They let us know what time they’ll be closing and if they’ll have any food to donate. If needed, we hand out plastic containers and reassure them that anything they donate is worthwhile. We’re flexible - "we’ll wait" is what we tell them. Rebecca and I, admittedly tired after a day at our own jobs, camp out in a convenient spot, looking now and then at our watches and observing the slow ebbing of people traffic. When we start to make our second round, the collection of breads, cakes, noodles, rice and other menu items, our footsteps and the creaking wheels of the cart have a closing-hour echo.

Our weekly mall trek is a volunteer effort on behalf of LEKET ISRAEL, an Israeli charity organization founded in 2003 to distribute surplus food that would otherwise be discarded. This organization is Israel’s leading food rescue and redistribution network. Almost 13,000 hot meals and 1,800 loaves of bread per week are collected from catering halls, food locations in malls, and bakeries. Once we’ve collected the food, and, hopefully, filled the shopping cart, we head for a refrigerated warehouse. Early the next morning the food can be allocated for sandwiches for kids (7,800 sandwiches are prepared daily by volunteers and distributed to disadvantaged school kids in over 100 schools in Israel) or distributed for meals to people in homeless shelters, senior centers and soup kitchens.

Of course, if I really wanted to be that hardy pioneer of my aliyah dreams, in shorts, sturdy boots and kova tembel, a veritable poster image treading the soil of Israel, I could volunteer for Project Leket (Gleaning) which rescues from fields, groves and orchards 154 tons of produce weekly from 450 farmers throughout the country. But – sigh – I am an urbanized creature and alas, a treader not of tilled earth but of the tiled floors of that consumer temple, the mall. So, I’ll be back next week, hoping to fill the shopping cart to overflowing, one of a very large group of volunteers who help feed more than 60,000 + people daily.

www.leket.org.il/english