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A kosher community fridge in Chicago’s Jewish suburbs arrives amid rising food insecurity
This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.
SKOKIE, Illinois — Just off East Prairie Road in this suburb of Chicago is a sign that says, “Welcome to Hersh’s Fridge.” At the bottom is a line in Aramaic, quoting the Passover Haggadah: “Let all who are hungry come and eat.”
It may not look like much, but the sign points to a pioneering project: an outdoor kosher community fridge that offers free, fresh foods and prepared meals that anyone can take anonymously. The food, provided by volunteers and local kosher restaurants, is available at any time of day or night.
The effort is aimed at providing food support for strapped kosher-observant households in the heavily Jewish neighborhood northwest of Chicago. In the week since it opened, the fridge has been heavily used, said Rabbi Hody Nemes of Skokie Valley Agudath Jacob Synagogue. As one of the organizers, he had already received several letters of gratitude from people who have visited.
While the initiative has been in the planning stage for a year, it has opened at a time of particular need. Tens of millions of Americans who depend on SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, to feed their households, are expected to lose SNAP benefits during the government shutdown, leading to long lines at food banks across the United States. At the same time, disruptive immigration enforcement raids by federal agents in Chicago — including, last weekend, in Skokie and adjacent Evanston — are putting additional pressure on needy families.
“A lot of our neighbors are feeling vulnerable right now, particularly with uncertainty around SNAP benefits,” Nemes said. “We want our neighbors to feel safe and well fed. We see the fridge as part of making sure that everyone, whoever they are, whatever their politics or their background, feels taken care of and welcome to take food, including people who are not part of the kosher-keeping community.”
The fridge is supported by a volunteer army of local teenagers. After witnessing years of food waste at Shabbat kiddush lunches, including at his own bar mitzvah, Avi Rubin, 17, a senior at Ida Crown Jewish Academy in Skokie, volunteered to join the project, which he said reflects the tenets of Judaism he has been taught in school. “Not wasting food is a Jewish value rooted in the halachic principle of Bal Tashchit, which prohibits senseless waste or destruction,” Rubin said.
Anabelle Ashman, 13, an eighth-grader at Hillel Torah Day School, said she got involved after meeting a woman in need while restocking another public fridge. “She explained to us that she was living in a house with three families,” Ashman said. “It was a really happy moment for me, because I realized that I could help the community like that.”
The project is named in honor of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the Israeli-American kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 and subsequently murdered by Hamas. Hersh’s parents, Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin, are originally from the Chicago area and met while attending Ida Crown.
Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin speak about their son Hersh at the Democratic National Convention, Aug. 21, 2025, in Chicago. (Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images); A sign advertises Hersh’s Fridge, a kosher food pantry in the Chicago suburbs. (Courtesy Hody Nemes)
The initiative is led by Solu, a local Orthodox Jewish organization that regularly partners with non-Jewish groups to address social issues. Solu, which has been working on food insecurity since the COVID pandemic, came up with the idea of a kosher fridge last year in response to spiking kosher food prices. After Hersh was murdered, they decided to name the initiative in his honor.
“Hersh was about doing good work, bringing people together, bridging divides,” said Rabbi Ari Hart, Solu’s co-founder and CEO. “We hope this fridge will be an engine for that in the community.”
Hart said the fridge offers a space for volunteers of all backgrounds to come together, including from a local mosque and church, to package kosher meals for neighbors in need.
The Jewish community and heavily Jewish neighborhoods such as Skokie and West Rogers Park are affected by poverty and food insecurity despite misconceptions to the contrary, said Nemes.
“All it can take is a job loss, or a major medical incident,” he said. “We’re blessed that we have strong social networks in the Jewish community, but even so, people can fall through the cracks.”
Jewish hunger advocates and nonprofits across the country have sprung into action as uncertainty has mounted about the future of SNAP payments. Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger and the Jewish Federations of North America are both pressing Congress to ensure SNAP benefits continue through the shutdown. Local Jewish federations, meanwhile, have begun distributing emergency grants, with the New York federation saying that 74,000 Jewish families in New York alone were at risk of losing their food benefits.
Jewish families in Chicago and its suburbs are also struggling, according to Nemes, who estimates that one-fifth of Jews in the near north suburbs are financially insecure.
The urgent need was highlighted for Nemes when a community member contacted him after the fridge was announced. “Someone said, ‘When will the fridge be up?’ I, foolishly, said, ‘Thank you for wanting to donate, it will be up this fall,’” he recalled. “They said, ‘I don’t want to donate, I need the food.’”
Nemes said the teenage volunteers are critical to the effort. “Kids and teens have already begun to play a deep role in servicing the fridge,” he said. “We hope that role only grows because we believe that to be a Jewish adult means to be a giver, and the best way to learn how is to start young.”
Rubin and fellow Ida Crown student, junior Hillel Lennon, 16, started a club at their school to promote teen involvement in the project. The pair were thrilled when close to half of the student body signed up to clean, check and restock the fridge, including purchasing food from local kosher grocery stores as well as picking up leftovers from nearby kosher restaurants such as Emma’s Cafe and Tacos Gingi, as well as local synagogues. Rubin ended up building the cabinet for the project’s dry-goods pantry.
Lennon said he was excited to be involved in a social effort that reached beyond Jewish institutions to the wider world. “As Jews, it’s very important to help our community and the people in need that live here,” he said.
The community fridge movement has surged in recent years amid a shift toward mutual aid in some communities and activist movements. While Hersh’s Fridge serves kosher-keeping households on Chicagoland’s north side, in the Hyde Park neighborhood on the city’s South Side, Congregation Rodfei Zedek operates its own public fridge as part of The Love Fridge Chicago, which has 17 locations across the city.
Volunteers construct Hersh’s Fridge, a kosher community fridge in the suburbs of Chicago. (Courtesy Hody Nemes)
Ezra Skol, 15, a sophomore at Kenwood Academy, is one of the teen volunteers at the Rodfei fridge. Skol said he enjoys seeing the direct impact of his service. “On many occasions, while we’ve been stocking the fridge, the people who are taking the food will come up and thank us for the work that we’re doing,” he said. “When I see these people, there’s a personal connection, I can actually see who I’m helping out.”
Skol has encouraged his friends to volunteer at the fridge. He emphasized how the project goes beyond simply providing food, strengthening the sense of community. “Ultimately, we’re all living in the same neighborhood and we’re sharing the same spaces. There’s a responsibility there, and that’s exactly what the Love Fridge is doing, it’s looking out for one another.”
For Hersh’s Fridge, organizers bought two full-size fridge-freezers as well as building the pantry, creating more capacity than pre-existing public fridges.
For Rubin, one of the most special aspects of the project is its anonymous nature.
“The Torah says you should give back to the poor,” he said. “But this is also discreet. People will just be able to come and pick up food. This fridge will bring an awareness to the issue because people will see that even in the Jewish community, there are still people in need.”
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German Antisemitism Commissioner Targeted With Death Threat Letter After Arson Attack on Home
Andreas Büttner (Die Linke), photographed during the state parliament session. The politician was nominated for the position of Brandenburg’s anti-Semitism commissioner. Photo: Soeren Stache/dpa via Reuters Connect
Andreas Büttner, the commissioner for antisemitism in the state of Brandenburg in northeastern Germany, has been targeted the second attack in under a week after receiving a death threat, sparking outrage and prompting local authorities to launch a full investigation.
According to the German newspaper Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten (PNN), the Brandenburg state parliament received a letter on Monday threatening Büttner’s life, with the words “We will kill you” and an inverted red triangle, the symbol of support for the Islamist terrorist group Hamas.
State security police have examined the anonymous letter under strict safety measures, determining that a gray substance inside was harmless. Authorities are now probing the incident as part of an ongoing investigation into threats against the German official.
Ulrike Liedtke, president of the Brandenburg state parliament, condemned the latest attack on Büttner, describing the death threats and harassment as “completely unacceptable.”
“Threats and violence are not a form of political discourse, but crimes against humanity,” Liedtke said. “Andreas Büttner has our complete support and solidarity.”
A former police officer and member of the Left Party, Büttner took office as commissioner for antisemitism in 2024 and has faced repeated attacks since.
On Sunday night, Büttner’s private property in Templin — a town located approximately 43 miles north of Berlin — was targeted in an arson attack, and a red Hamas triangle was spray-painted on his house.
The home of Germany’s antisemitism commissioner, Andreas Büttner, was set on fire overnight in a targeted attack.
His family was inside the house at the time.
This is the second attack against Büttner in the past 16 months. His car was previously vandalized with swastikas. This… pic.twitter.com/cAbFnMIwQ7
— Combat Antisemitism Movement (@CombatASemitism) January 5, 2026
According to Büttner, his family was inside the house at the time of the attack, marking the latest assault against him in the past 16 months.
“The symbol sends a clear message. The red Hamas triangle is widely recognized as a sign of jihadist violence and antisemitic incitement,” Büttner said in a statement after the incident.
“Anyone who uses such a thing wants to intimidate and glorify terror. This is not a protest, it is a threat,” he continued.
Hamas uses inverted red triangles in its propaganda videos to indicate Israeli targets about to be attacked. The symbol, a common staple at pro-Hamas rallies, has come to represent the Palestinian terrorist group and glorify its use of violence.
In August 2024, swastikas and other symbols and threats were also spray-painted on Büttner’s personal car.
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Harvard President Blasts Scholar Activism, Calls for ‘Restoring Balance’ in Higher Ed
Harvard University President Alan Garber speaks during the 374th Commencement exercises at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, May 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
Harvard University president Alan Garber, fresh off a resounding endorsement in which the Harvard Corporation elected to keep him on the job “indefinitely,” criticized progressive faculty in a recent podcast interview for turning the university classroom into a pulpit for the airing of their personal views on contentious political issues.
Garber made the comments last week on the “Identity/Crisis Podcast,” a production of the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jewish think tank which specializes in education research.
“I think that’s where we went wrong,” Garber said, speaking to Yehuda Kurtzer. “Because think about it, if a professor in a classroom says, ‘This is what I believe about this issue,’ how many students — some of you probably would be prepared to deal with this, but most people wouldn’t — how many students would actually be willing to go toe to toe against a professor who’s expressed a firm view about a controversial issue?”
Garber continued, saying he believes higher education, facing a popular backlash against what critics have described as political indoctrination, is now seeing a “movement to restore balance in teaching and to bring back the idea that you really need to be objective in the classroom.”
He added, “What we need to arm our students with is a set of facts and a set of analytic tools and cultivation of rigor in analyzing these issues.”
Coming during winter recess and the Jewish and Christian holidays, Garber’s interview fell under the radar after it was first aired but has been noticed this week, with some observers pointing to it as evidence that Harvard is leading an effort to restore trust in the university even as it resists conceding to the Trump administration everything it has demanded regarding DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), viewpoint diversity, and expressive activity such as protests.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Garber has spent the past two years fighting factions from within and without the university that have demanded to steer its policies and culture — from organizers of an illegal anti-Israel encampment to US President Donald Trump, who earlier this year canceled $2.26 billion in public money for Harvard after it refused to grant his wishlist of reforms for which the conservative movement has clamored for decades.
Even as Harvard tells Trump “no,” it has enacted several policies as a direct response to criticisms that the institution is too permissive of antisemitism for having allowed anti-Zionist extremism to reach the point of antisemitic harassment and discrimination. In 2025, the school agreed to incorporate into its policies a definition of antisemitism supported by most of the Jewish community, established new rules governing campus protests, and announced new partnerships with Israeli academic institutions. Harvard even shuttered a DEI office and transferred its staff to what will become, according to a previous report by The Harvard Crimson, a “new Office of Culture and Community.” The paper added that Harvard has even “worked to strip all references to DEI from its website.”
Appointed in January 2024 as interim president, Garber — who previously served in roles as Harvard’s provost and chief academic officer — rose to the top position at America’s oldest and, arguably, most prestigious institution at a time when the job was least desirable. At the time, Harvard was being pilloried over some of its students cheering Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel and even forming gangs which mobbed Jewish students wending their way through campus; the university had suffered the embarrassment of its first Black president being outed as a serial plagiarist, a stunning disclosure which called into question its vetting procedures as well as its embrace of affirmative action; and anti-Israel activists on campus were disrupting classes and calling for others to “globalize the intifada.”
Garber has since won over the Harvard Corporation, which has refused to replace him during a moment that has been described as the most challenging in its history.
“Alan’s humble, resilient, and effective leadership has shown itself to be not just a vital source of calm in turbulent times, but also a generative force for sustaining Harvard’s commitment to academic excellence and to free inquiry and expression,” Harvard Corporation senior fellow Penny Pritzker said in a statement issued on behalf of the body, which is the equivalent of a board of trustees. “From restoring a sense of community during a period of intense scrutiny and division to launching vital new programs on viewpoint diversity and civil discourses and instituting new actions to fight antisemitism and anti-Arab bias, Alan has not only stabilized the university but brought us together in support of our shared mission.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Holocaust Survivors Sent Care Packages to Oct. 7 Hostages for Hanukkah
The Menorah for Hanukkah on the Square 2025 in Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom, Dec. 14, 2025. Photo: Matthew Chattle/Cover Images via Reuters Connect
Survivors of the Holocaust spread holiday cheer this Hanukkah by delivering care packages to a group of 20 hostages whom the terrorist group Hamas recently released from captivity to fulfill the requirements of a ceasefire which suspended hostilities with Israel.
The gifts, dropped off at the Israeli consulate office in New York City, was made possible by The Blue Card, the only US-based charity organization which provides financial assistance and other services to survivors of the Holocaust. Originally founded in 1934 to assist Jews who had fled Germany to escape Hitler’s persecution of the country’s Jews, it has operated ceaselessly for nearly a century.
Over the past two years, the world has seen a revival of antisemitism unlike any since the period in which The Blue Card was founded, sparked by the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre that claimed the lives over of 1,200 Israelis and stole years and even more lives from 251 more who were kidnapped and held hostage in Gaza.
Some of the hostages who survived captivity have been released in stages since Israel and Hamas agreed on a ceasefire in October, and on Monday, Blue Card executive director Masha Pearl said the organization felt it necessary to reach out to them due to their having experienced a plight that is painfully familiar to what its clients endured in Europe during the Holocaust. Pearl also discussed the Bondi Beach mass shooting, in which a father and son inspired by Islamism opened fire on Jews celebrating the start of Hanukkah, murdering 15 people and injuring 40 others.
“Holocaust survivors and former hostages share a uniquely painful bond shaped by survival and resilience,” Pearl said. “After witnessing a mass shooting at a Chanukah event in Sydney, it felt even more urgent for our survivors to deliver these care packages now, spreading light at a moment that feels dark for the entire Jewish world. The resilience of the Holocaust survivors we assist, the former hostages, and now the survivors of the attack in Australia remind us that even in the face of hatred and violence, the Jewish people remain united.”
In a press release Blue Card said the care packages “carried profound meaning,” being filled to the brim with goods of all sorts, from blankets and water bottles to chap stick and even handwritten notes from the Holocaust survivors who sent them.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.