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.

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.

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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The post A kosher community fridge in Chicago’s Jewish suburbs arrives amid rising food insecurity appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

The Heritage Foundation is the country’s leading conservative think tank. President Donald Trump’s last campaign platform was partly dreamed up in its sleek Capitol Hill headquarters. Thousands of young people, myself included, have gained valuable knowledge and experience via Heritage’s various programs. What it does and says matters.

And what it did and said last week endangers not just the Jewish community — but our country’s social fabric.

That might come as a surprise. After all, Heritage recently launched its laudable Project Esther, a national strategy to “combat the scourge of antisemitism in the United States.” 

Heritage’s detailed blueprint was published following an onslaught of anti-Jewish violence and rhetoric after the October 7th massacre, particularly from the anti-Israel far-left and those who endorse Hamas and other Islamist terrorist groups.

Among Project Esther’s aims are to “erode support for antisemitic behavior, expose the individuals and organizations supporting such conduct to discourage it, and laud the individuals and organizations effectively countering it to encourage others to join.”

Last week, though, Heritage incentivized precisely the opposite behavior.

In an on-camera statement shared on X, Heritage President Kevin Roberts told followers: “We will always defend truth, we will always defend America, and we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda. That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains, and, as I have said before, always will be, a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.”

The statement was posted less than 48 hours after Carlson, who began his career at the think tank, took much-deserved criticism for holding a softball interview with far-right podcaster, antisemite, and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.

Responding to widespread concerns about the interview, Roberts complained of a “venomous coalition attempting to cancel” Carlson, adding that the right should not “cancel its own people.” Christians, he said, “can critique the state of Israel without being antisemitic.”

But it is false to conflate the Carlson-Fuentes interview and its overt anti-Jewish rhetoric with mere “critique” of Israel, and it is equally dishonest to suggest in turn that the speakers are mere “Israel critics.”

Both Carlson and Fuentes crossed that line long ago — and that is precisely why Heritage’s continuing proximity to them is a problem.

This is not new territory for Carlson. My organization, CAMERA, which takes no stances on partisan political issues, has outlined the ex-Fox News host’s grim pattern of appeasing anti-Jewish figures and myths.

In August, Carlson uncritically platformed an Orthodox nun who framed Hamas as a legitimate “resistance” organization, fawned over an antisemitic “poet,” and promoted laughably flimsy historical claims such as the idea that Palestinians, rather than Jews, were the first people to become Christians.

Then there was Carlson’s cozy chat with Lutheran pastor Munther Isaac, who blamed a relative collapse in Bethlehem’s Christian population on Israel rather than the Palestinian Authority’s misrule.

Carlson has also lately alluded to baseless conspiracy theories that Israel was behind Charlie Kirk’s assassination (Carlson has since been working with Kirk’s Turning Point USA.)

Carlson’s decision to play chummy with Fuentes, therefore, is nothing new.

Fuentes, an Internet figure with hundreds of thousands of followers, has called Adolf Hitler “really f***ing cool,” and said that if his movement gained power, it would execute “perfidious Jews.”

In 2019, Fuentes used an analogy of the Cookie Monster baking cookies in an attempt to deny the murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. His followers, known as the “Groypers,” routinely expressed their support for Fuentes by using the acronym “RKD4NJF,” which stands for “Rape, kill, and die for Nicholas Joseph Fuentes.” Carlson can hardly claim plausible deniability over Fuentes’s chilling record.

Fuentes used the podcast appearance with Carlson to argue that “organized Jewry in America” was a “big challenge.”

Fuentes did not level any criticism toward a particular Jewish organization or campaign group, just “Jewry” as a whole. Carlson, once known for his abrasive interview style, failed to push back against Fuentes, but instead joined in by charging that Christian Zionists had a “brain virus” and that he “dislike[d] them more than anybody.”

Kevin Roberts’ claim that his movement must “focus on its political opponents” simply does not align with his claim that truth must prevail.

If truth is a central value, Roberts should recognize Tucker and Fuentes — who are enemies of the truth — as “opponents.”

If antisemitism were something worth opposing, Roberts should speak out against it wherever in the media and political ecosystem it arises.

Some may perceive Roberts’ remarks as a fleeting public relations blip. Unfortunately, they reveal something more sinister.

As memories of the Second World War wane and libels regarding Israel are showcased daily by the mainstream media, antisemitism as an organized movement is ripe for a renaissance in the West. Too many major institutions, on both the Left and Right, are now either afraid to call it out — or are increasingly sympathetic to it.

D.C. policy wonks do not necessarily represent the views of ordinary people, but they are important political and cultural arbiters, suggesting to people what is acceptable, with potentially huge consequences. If these influencers are beginning to warm to the “Groypers” and their apologists, they must be called out and confronted, whatever their historically lofty stature.

Furthermore, we cannot simply ignore Carlson and Fuentes as Internet trolls. Both have huge followings, in part because they spread easily digestible lies about Israel and Jews. This needs robust pushback by all of us who genuinely care about “defending truth,” or our media and politics will be doomed to failure.

As Harvard professor Ruth Wisse notes: “Antisemitism is not about the Jews, but about those who organize politics against them. And any society governed by that ideology is doomed.” We must help Washington heed this warning.

​Georgia L. Gilholy is a member of the Communications Team at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA).

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CAMERA.

Turkey‘s MIT intelligence agency chief met Hamas‘s negotiating team head Khalil Al-Hayya on Wednesday, and they discussed the path to be followed in implementing the next phases of the Gaza ceasefire plan, Turkish security sources said.

They said MIT chief Ibrahim Kalin met the Hamas delegation in Istanbul and they also discussed steps to ensure smooth operation of the ceasefire process and how to overcome existing problems.

Turkey, a longtime state backer of Hamas, has been pushing to have a significant role in Gaza’s reconstruction, including through military forces on the ground to help implement US President Donald Trump’s peace plan.

Israel has adamantly opposed such efforts, noting Turkey’s support for Hamas and hostile stance toward the Jewish state.