During the Covid-19 crisis, the Temple Israel of Natick Men’s Club organized two Friday Night Shabbat meal delivery efforts in our local community. The program was a win-win-win, assisting individuals and families in need, engaging our Club members at a time when programming was otherwise necessarily limited, and supporting a small business important to our Temple community.

With our Club fortunate to be in a strong financial position, our board was seeking a way to use our resources to assist in this time of great need. We decided to pay for and deliver Friday night meals for those in our community that could benefit from a little help. We reached out to our Rabbi, Cantor and Temple caring committee to identify potential need within the Temple membership. When we discovered, happily, that this need was limited, we contacted local service agency Jewish Family Service of MetroWest (JFS) to identify additional households in the broader community. Between the Temple and JFS, we identified 15 total households (28 people in all).

We arranged with the caterer that handles many community dinners and family simchas celebrated at the Temple to prepare the meals. Her business had obviously been negatively impacted by the stay at home orders. She was thrilled to help and planned a great, practical menu.

Now it was time to seek volunteers. A single email to the Club membership yielded close to 20 responses within a couple hours.

The caterer prepared well labelled meal packages and a single Club volunteer brought the meals out to volunteers’ cars as they arrived in designated time slots. The volunteers communicated with the meal recipients for safe and (mostly) efficient delivery procedures.  

We decided to repeat the effort three weeks later in conjunction with an already planned event where Temple members could order Friday night meals and pick them up at the Temple. In this case, another Temple fund sponsored meals for members requesting support, and the Men’s Club focused our efforts on delivering to households identified through JFS. Repeating the effort and piggybacking on an existing meal minimized our planning obligations. We tapped volunteers who responded to our initial outreach, but who we hadn’t needed for the first set of deliveries. We delivered meals for nine households and were again greeted by appreciative faces and good Shabbos wishes.

We are grateful to have found this way to help our community and stay active as a Club.

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Dan Zwelling is President of the Temple Israel of Natick Men’s Club