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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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More US Jews feel ‘politically homeless’ than ever. What are we to do?
The news that most Jewish adults don’t feel comfortable in either major political party is not a death knell for American Jewish political participation. It’s a rallying cry.
Most American Jews feel politically unrepresented by both parties, an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Research poll released this week found. That survey only confirms what every conversation I’ve had with Jewish friends lately gets around to: a new sense of political homelessness, combined with fears of increasing antisemitism.
Only 15% of respondents say the Democratic Party supports Jewish people in the United States “extremely” or “very” well, and 41% say it supports them “not very well” or “not at all.” Views of the Republicans are slightly worse — about half say the party doesn’t really support Jews.
What the poll shows is an undeniable slide in both parties on an issue many Jews still care deeply about, Israel, as well as the feeling that too much anti-Israel sentiment bleeds into antisemitism.
The poll found 63% of Jewish adults consider antisemitism an extremely or very serious problem, and 77% say prejudice has increased since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023. Only 38% of Americans overall share that level of concern. The gap between how seriously Jews perceive the threat and how seriously the broader public does only compounds our sense that we’ve been abandoned by civic institutions, and no longer fit neatly within the party system.
At first glance, the fact that American Jews feel less attached to either political party isn’t unusual. A growing number of all Americans are turned off by the two major parties, according to a May New York Times poll, which found that 43% of voters were dissatisfied with both parties.
But a major source of party dissatisfaction, the Times poll found, was, yep, America’s relationship with Israel. Among dissatisfied voters, 80% opposed economic and military aid to Israel. That includes 38% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who said they wanted the party to distance itself from Israel. That’s what Vice President JD Vance meant when he recently said — warned? — that, “Israel’s opinions matter, but fundamentally they are separate.”
So a shrinking share of Americans in both parties supports Israel — while roughly six in 10 American Jews say Israel is central to who they are. That’s the squeeze. No wonder we feel unsupported.
It’s tempting to litigate why this gap exists. You could argue that it’s not fair. You could argue a dozen other countries behave worse than Israel, or that Qatari and Chinese money have poisoned American minds and infected the algorithms, or that the antipathy toward Israel and Zionism has always been and will always be about Jew-hatred.
Still: this is where we are in 2026, and we can’t will the facts away. So where, politically, do Jews turn? How do we pick a lane when they all seem to lead to dead ends?
One option is to leave. In the past, the somewhat glib answer to “where should we go?” if Jews wanted to run away — or were kicked out — was, of course, Israel. American Jews who kept one bag packed by the door — even if figuratively — saw the Jewish state as a refuge.
But our relationship with Israel as it is now is complicated. Putting aside the fact that a country that has weathered years of war and terror is hardly a refuge, American Jews are deeply unhappy with the current Israeli government. The AP poll found that 4 in 10 Jewish adults think the U.S. is too supportive of Israel, and that among American Jews, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is more popular than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
If there is no flight, there is only fight.
That’s what former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel was doing in Tel Aviv this week with a speech in which he called for a “fundamentally new and different approach” to U.S.-Israel relations. He was not fighting against Israel, but fighting for his party — the Democrats — to demand more of it. He talked about his emotional ties to Israel — something the majority of American Jews share — as well as his critiques.
And it’s why sharp criticism of his speech came from both sides of the aisle. On the right, Jonathan Tobin at JNS called the speech a recycling of “the persistent delusion of failed policies,” and Peter Savodnik at The Free Press wrote that Emanuel “bows to the left.” Meanwhile, the left accused Emanuel of placing too much blame on the Palestinians for corruption and intransigence, and for trying to stake out a pro-Israel position within the Democratic Party.
Emanuel didn’t pick a lane, which is why people who hold such disparate ideologies are all upset with him. Instead, he carved a new one. He embraced a politics so critical of Israel that it would have been anathema in mainstream Democratic circles until very recently. That’s not a bad thing. His idea — which is really an idea promoted by the progressive pro-Israel lobbying group J Street — is that the U.S. should push Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab nations toward a “23 state solution” that recognizes Palestinian rights and integrates Israel fully into the Middle East. As far-fetched as it seems now, it is also more pragmatic and optimistic than anything the far left or right have to offer.
Emanuel showed one option for how to decouple support for a strong, secure Israel from support for the disastrous direction in which the country’s leaders are taking it. He showed how to love Israel as an American Jew, warts and all. His position is highly critical of the country’s current leadership and direction — as are the majority of Israelis, by the way — but out of concern for its security and democracy, not out of objection to its existence. It’s a position that recognizes the rights of all peoples between the river and the sea to security and self-determination. It moves beyond blame to solutions.
The right response to American Jews’ sense of political abandonment is for candidates who care about our community — and despite our dismay, there are many — to pivot, like Emanuel, to making creative cases for the future. Come with a vision, come with a plan, come with a path that offers the chance of a better life for the millions of Jews and Arabs who live there and aren’t going anywhere. Come with a pitch that shows American Jews that the full complexity of our concerns matters, and that your parties are capable of adapting to meet this moment.
That’s the fight that has to happen. Don’t wait for a lane to open. Pick a party, and start opening one.
The post More US Jews feel ‘politically homeless’ than ever. What are we to do? appeared first on The Forward.
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UK Jewish groups express concern as the likely next PM criticizes Israel over Gaza
(JTA) — Andy Burnham, who is on track to become Britain’s next prime minister following Keir Starmer’s resignation last month, apologized for his party’s handling of the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas mass killings in Israel, saying that it should have done more to push for a ceasefire and called for exerting greater pressure on the Jewish state today.
His comments prompted a joint response from the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council, which said they had contacted his team to express “significant concerns” about his remarks.
Burnham made his comments in a video statement on Thursday in response to questions from the public. Burnham is likely to become the next prime minister after gaining the overwhelming support of sitting Labour members of Parliament. To date no one has challenged him for the party’s leadership ahead of a July 17 deadline.
“I know many people feel that at the start of Israel’s military action in Gaza, my party didn’t get it right, and I am sorry about that,” he said. He added that he supported further sanctions on Israelis involved in the violence in Gaza, measures to ban trade with Israeli settlements and restrictions on arms licenses to Israel, saying there was “increasing evidence that war crimes appear to have been committed.”
He also condemned increased antisemitism in Britain, and said that tackling antisemitism did not contradict holding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to account.
His comments came as lawmakers across the political spectrum have pushed for increased condemnation of Israel and sanctions on the country.
“The unbearable suffering in Gaza is a scar on our collective conscience,” Burnham said. “The killing of innocent Palestinians, including children,” was “completely unacceptable,” he added, declaring that Britain had to do more to “put pressure on the Israeli government.”
He described the country as “too slow to call for a ceasefire” and that “we must now do more to strengthen our approach” as “Israel continues to violate the ceasefire agreement killing innocent Palestinians.”
In their response, the Board and JLC said they shared “concern for the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip” but stated that the conflict “cannot be understood without reference to the role of Hamas not only in launching the conflict but in perpetuating the war through the holding of hostages, war-fighting entirely from within the civilian population, and [their] ongoing refusal to cede power and disarm, in line with the 20 point peace plan.”
They added that the conflict also could not be understood without reference to Hamas’ regional backers and allies, including Iran and Hezbollah. Burnham addressed none of this in his comments.
Burnham did, however, reiterate his condemnation of Hamas, describing the Oct. 7 attacks as “monstrous,” stressing that he denounced them “as strongly today as I did in the immediate aftermath.”
He said that he also condemned “the increase in appalling antisemitic attacks here in the U.K. and those who seek to divide our communities by targeting Jewish people.”
“I felt first-hand the anxiety in our Jewish community and the very real threat they face,” the former mayor of Greater Manchester said, referring to the Yom Kippur 2025 attack on the city’s Heaton Park synagogue in which two people were killed.
The Board and JLC welcomed Burnham’s “zero tolerance approach to antisemitism” and affirmed his assertion that “there is no contradiction between fighting antisemitism and disagreeing with actions of the Israeli government.”
However, they said, “Antisemitism cannot be confronted without addressing all its drivers,” arguing that in Britain that includes “Islamist, far left and far right extremists who go beyond criticism of the Israeli government to a place of hatred directed at Jews and Israelis.”
Their joint statement pointed out that Burnham knew “first hand the links between hatred of Israel, antisemitic extremism and deadly violence against British Jews,” adding that, “in a country in which antisemitism has become more normalized, more extreme and more violent, we call on our leaders to show the utmost care in their rhetoric in relation to the conflict.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post UK Jewish groups express concern as the likely next PM criticizes Israel over Gaza appeared first on The Forward.
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NY congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier doubles down on attending Oct. 8 pro-Palestinian rally
(JTA) — Democratic congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier defended her presence at a pro-Palestinian rally the day after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel during a wide-ranging interview Friday with progressive Jewish author Peter Beinart.
“I think the targeting of civilians is wrong in any context, including on Oct. 7,” Avila Chevalier said when asked by the editor-at-large of the leftist Jewish Currents about slogans legitimizing “resistance” that appeared at the rally. Avila Chevalier previously defended her attendance at the rally to City & State in June.
“I think what matters is international law, and what international law condemns and protects,” she said. “And it condemns the targeting of civilians, and it also protects the right to resist.”
Beinart, who is an outspoken critic of Israel and a journalism professor at the City University of New York, pushed back, saying that he “didn’t see any discussion of international law in that rally on the signs or the slogans of the kind that you are offering now … Were you uncomfortable by that?”
Avila Chevalier responded that, at any protest, there will always be “folks who are voicing opinions that you might not agree with.”
“I knew even as early as Oct. 8, right, where this cycle was headed, and I knew the things that I did have power over,” Avila Chevalier said. “The thing that we have power over is the fact that our tax dollars are going towards an apartheid state that has a pattern of engaging in this type of retribution against civilians.”
Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist who helped organize pro-Palestinian encampments at Columbia University, ousted incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat last month in the Democratic primary for New York’s 13th Congressional District, which covers parts of Upper Manhattan and the Bronx.
“Today we make it clear. The politics of the past ends today,” Avila Chevalier told attendees at an election night watch party, where the crowd erupted into cheers of “Free Palestine.”
She joined two other progressive and Israel-critical candidates backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani in winning upset primary victories, cementing the anti-Israel mayor’s influence in the city’s politics and likely extending the left’s gains in Congress since the wins came in deeply Democratic districts.
Beinart’s interview offered an extensive look into the Israel-related positions that became flashpoints during Avila Chevalier’s campaign, including her attendance at the Oct. 8 rally, which was condemned at the time by Mamdani and fellow congressional candidate Brad Lander, and past criticism of former President Joe Biden’s policy toward Israel and Gaza in a since-deleted X account.
Many of the attendees on Friday’s Zoom call appeared unimpressed by the candidate’s responses.
“She is well intentioned, but also clearly is not familiar with the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” said Hillel Schenker, a veteran American-Israeli peace activist.
Other attendees defended Avila Chevalier.
“I am surprised and disturbed by many of the comments made here that are just dismissing her comments and her approach to expressing her belief in human rights and a world without hierarchies of peoples,” wrote an attendee with the screen name Benjy Ben Baruch.
To kick off the interview, Avilia Chevalier described her internship in the West Bank as a 20-year-old Columbia University student, saying that at the time she observed “systems and how they were impacting Palestinian people and Jewish folks, and how people were being treated based off of those state structures.”
Beinart then asked Avila Chevalier why she believed Israel had become so “central for progressive politics.”
“I think there is a war machine that is insatiable,” Avila Chevalier replied. “An American war machine, the Israeli war machine, that we fund with our tax dollars as Americans, and instead what we could be funding is our communities.”
When asked by Beinart what she wanted to see as the future of the region, Avila Chevalier voiced her support for a one-state solution, which she described as “one governing body, one state that sees everyone as equal before the law, regardless of race, religion, identity, ethnicity.”
“We have seen over the course of history that attempts at two states have failed, and even so, I think in this question of like, well, do we partition to begin with, that inherently is divisive,” Avila Chevalier said.
Avila Chevalier also stopped short of saying that “Zionism is racism” when asked if she agreed with the statement by Beinart.
“Zionism is an ideology that creates this type of hierarchy that I’m talking about, and I just don’t believe that we should be striving for a world where there is a hierarchy among people,” Avila Chevalier replied.
Towards the end of the conversation, Beinart referenced scrutiny Avila Chevalier had drawn for her 2022 statements in which she condemned Dominican nationalism and said it was the reason she didn’t put the flag in her social media bio.
“What do you see as the fundamental differences between Zionism as a form of Jewish nationalism, the Dominican nationalism that you have had some concerns about, and Palestinian nationalism,” Beinart asked Avila Chevalier, whose parents are Dominican immigrants.
In response, Avila Chevalier referenced racist attacks she had endured for those comments in the lead-up to the election.
“While it’s not the majority of Dominicans, I would never say that, I think there is a faction that supports this ideology that I have just always found incredibly violent, and the type of rhetoric that I was subjected to, I think, is reflective of the very thing I was criticizing, and I see a lot of that in Zionism as well,” Avila Chevalier responded.
The candidate added that, in contrast to Zionism and Dominican nationalism, Haitian and Palestinian discussions of “liberation” were rooted in “a more universalist understanding of human rights before the law.”
“When I was there in Palestine, you know, some of the most dehumanizing language I’ve ever heard, right, was coming from Israeli soldiers towards children,” Avila Chevalier said, adding that she saw the movements “in very different lights.”
When asked whether she worried that “Hamas’s version of Palestinian nationalism may have exclusionary elements as well,” Avila Chevalier replied: “That’s why I worry about nationalism point blank.”
“Nationalism itself always gives me pause, but I think it’s important to also consider the context in which we’re talking about, like what group is engaging in this conversation, right, and the power dynamics at play there,” Avila Chevalier continued.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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