Mitzvah Day Promotes Community Service

Over 700 people of all ages answered the call to volunteer for the Palo Alto Community Mitzvah Day Monday. Mitzvah Days were held at synagogues and Jewish Community Centers throughout the United States.

Organized by the Oshman Family Jewish Community Center the volunteers participated in 29 projects of community service in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Mitzvah means "good deed" in Hebrew.

The projects ranged from preparing lunches and dinner for homeless people to visiting seniors at a nursing home to planting trees with Collective Roots.

This was the JCC’s fourth annual service day, and Luba Palant, its coordinator, said, “We have had a tremendous response to this year’s Mitzvah Day."

Several projects benefited the local Ronald McDonald House, including making desserts, blankets and birthday boxes for the children and decorations for the facility.

Advancing literacy was a popular endeavor. One project involved packing boxes of books for shipment to Botswana through the African Library Project . In its five years of existence this organization has supplied libraries in Africa with over 600,000 books. Underscoring the importance of literacy in building a peaceful society for the 21st century, the UN has declared 2003-2012 as United Nations Literacy Decade.

Closer to home, the Jewish Coalition for Literacy has been using volunteer tutors to help disadvantaged students in public elementary schools for the past ten years. Program Manager Jennifer Advani said that “tutors could be teenagers, full-time working people or retired people.” Seventeen people participated in the Mitzvah Day training session to learn how to work with children who need help in reading skills.

Every volunteer was asked to bring a non-perishable item for the Second Harvest Food Bank. A group of volunteers spent their Mitzvah Day morning at the food bank itself, helping sort food at the warehouse and inspecting and categorizing food products. They also labeled food packages and repackaged food items donated by individuals and food companies.

The kitchen at the JCC was in use all day. From 9:00 to 11:00 AM volunteers prepared desserts for patients at Ronald McDonald House. For the next four hours a team of 22 volunteers including Rabbi Elisheva Salamo from Congregation Keddem cooked dinner (lasagna, garlic bread, salad and cup cakes) for delivery to the Maple Street homeless shelter in Redwood City.

Laurie Fischer, who has been doing this for the past four years, led the team and told them, “If we didn’t make this dinner, 80 people would go hungry tonight because the shelter staff is off for Martin Luther King Day.” Barbara, a volunteer cook said, “I do it to help other people and because it’s fun to work together with our friends.”

What's really exciting is the number of families and children that get involved," said Luba Palent. "It's inspiring and humbling at the same time."