With much of Houston’s kosher-food supplies ruined by catastrophic floods, the first refrigerated truck with kosher staples arrived in Houston late last week just in time for Shabbat. The driver? Rabbi Dov Mandel, director of Chabad-Lubavitch of Fort Worth, Texas, about a four-hour drive northwest of Houston. The truck’s contents included meat, poultry, milk and other perishables, and originated in Miami earlier in the week.
By Monday afternoon, the Harvey crisis relief team based out of Chabad of Texas Regional Headquarters in Houston realized that the city would soon be out of kosher food. Three of the four main area supermarkets with extensive kosher sections were out of commission, and the city’s one kosher grocery was rapidly running out of supplies. A large initial order was placed with a kosher distributor in Miami and a refrigerated truck rented. Yet even as flood waters have begun to subside in Houston itself, Harvey (now downgraded to a Tropical Depression, but still wreaking havoc) has moved east, bringing major flooding in its wake.
“The trucking company said they had no way of getting into Houston from the east,” says Rabbi Dovid Goldstein, a Houston Chabad emissary who has been coordinating food and supply shipments into the city at Chabad Harvey Relief. Large parts of Interstate 10, which carries traffic from Florida to Houston through Beaumont, are underwater with sections of the highway closed. Working together with the kosher distributor, the truck was able to be rerouted north to Dallas.
The truck from Miami was carrying food not only destined for Chabad’s relief program and soup kitchen, but also a new supply for Kosherama, the kosher grocery nearby.
With the help of friends and community members in Fort Worth, Mandel rented a refrigerated truck and headed to Chabad of Dallas, where the goods from Miami were waiting to be transferred. Local donations of much-needed items, such as tape and masks to aid in the cleanup effort, were added in; 30 minutes later, Mandel was behind the wheel, driving the goods down to Houston.
“My parents live in Houston, and my mother asked me to call her when I get in so she could go to the kosher store,” Mandel tells Chabad.org. “The place was mobbed when I pulled up. There was nothing else.”
After making the delivery on Thursday evening, Mandel took to Facebook to thank his community: “I don’t know how to say this, but thanks to the generosity of the Fort Worth community, we singlehandedly restocked the kosher market in Houston, Kosherama, and we restocked all of the soup kitchens with kosher food,” he wrote. “Others will come later, but our little community was there first. Yasher Koach.”
More is coming—and fast. As the Miami kosher truck was being worked on, a simultaneous effort was underway in New York, where Houston Chabad community member Pinny Bard-Widgor had flown in the beginning of the week and was helping to coordinate kosher-food shipments. What he hoped would be two trucks of relief turned into six—three of them arriving from Lakewood, N.J., late Friday morning.
Additionally, a 53-foot semi-trailer that left last week from the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., arrived this morning. Two more trucks—all six were driven by Jewish community volunteers—left Brooklyn on Friday, stopping for Shabbat at Chabad of Knoxville, Tenn., before continuing on to Houston on Saturday night.
A Huge Collaborative Effort
“This has been a huge collaborative effort,” says Bard-Widgor. “Since word got out, we’ve been contacted by more and more community members looking for ways to help.”
Bard-Widgor credits Lecheiris—a New York-based Jewish organization that assists people in hospitals and prisons—and the Lakewood-Houston Relief Team, a group of volunteers in Lakewood, N.J., with arranging trucks and drivers, as well as pick-up of donated items from throughout New York and New Jersey. Assistance in this effort locally came from Young Israel of Houston.
Pallets of food were donated through kosher distributor Quality Frozen Foods (which included donations from Unger’s, Chopsie’s, Bodek, Snack Delite, Dyna Sea, Amnon’s, Mehadrin, Aufschnitt, Marzipan Bakery, Ceres Juice, Grab 1 Bars, Kitov, Pereg, Leiber’s, Yerek, Manischewitz, Osem, Zoglo, Hod Lavan and others), Supreme Star/Kadouri Division of Star Snacks, Kedem and Kemach.
“There have been things people don’t even realize we need,” says Bard-Widgor. “Someone called me to donate a pallet of garbage bags, the Boxery donated a pallet of cardboard boxes, so that we have something to distribute with in Houston.”
A separate effort will be leaving five different cities on Sunday. Dubbed the “Convoy of Hope,” Chabad rabbis in Atlanta; Chattanooga, Tenn.; Detroit; and New Haven and Fairfield, Conn., will be taking trucks filled with supplies donated by their communities since the end of last week on the road, meeting up at Chabad Harvey Relief headquarters in Houston.
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