By Margot Kravette, founder of Mitzvah Meals for Medical Visitors, a program newly housed at Jewish Family Service.
Just imagine… You are accompanying a family member to a city 2,000 miles away from home so they can receive life-saving heart surgery and medical care that is unavailable where you live. You are leaving your 7- and 9-year-old children with other families. Your older child is in college away from home.
Your family member has had their surgery but would be very sick the entire time in the hospital. You thought you would be gone just three weeks; you did not anticipate or plan for three more.
There would be no hospital-sponsored or reasonably priced housing available, so you stay at a nearby hotel. Microwaves and refrigerators in the rooms were rare in those days, so eating in the hospital cafeteria would be the most reasonable way to pay for your meals.
Although cell phones were common, there were charges by the minute for any calls you made outside of the local area code. You would try to connect with the Jewish community while in this strange city. Your home rabbi would call a rabbi friend to help make connections, hoping for a Shabbat meal or two, but that effort would produce no offers.
This is exactly the experience I had in 1993.
For a total of six weeks, I was away from home, from my children, and from my community. Watching my family member so ill was difficult, concerning, and scary. I was very lonely and became rather depressed.
After I returned home, I thought about my experience and how Seattle’s world-class medical facilities draw patients from all over the world. Because of my own experience, I formed a volunteer group to provide Jewish families coming here for medical care with regular home-cooked meals and a connection to the Jewish community.
I don’t remember how I got connected to the first family we helped—a young woman who was here with her husband and infant son and getting care at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center. By the time we met, they were renting a room at the nearby Silver Cloud Hotel while she was receiving care as an outpatient. Because of her illness, she was unable to leave her room or be near other people, except for appointments at the clinic, making meals especially difficult for her husband. Our volunteers made and brought them two to three home-cooked meals a week during the remainder of their stay.
Over the last 25 years, more than 200 volunteers have brought meals to dozens of Jewish families from cities throughout the U.S. and several from Israel. The responses from families were exactly what I had hoped for. They were so grateful and full of praise for our community, often relating how having home-cooked meals and seeing friendly faces helped them get through some difficult times.
Now, it’s time to ensure the future of this program. I approached Jewish Family Service and its Community Connections team, and together, we created a vision of the program under their umbrella: Mitzvah Meals for Medical Visitors (Mitzvah Meals). Mitzvah Meals will continue to provide two to three meals a week to families living in Seattle temporarily, but now with the additional infrastructure an organization like JFS can provide.
Because families coming to Seattle for medical care often reach out to a local Seattle friend, acquaintance, or relative who then reaches out to a synagogue or a Jewish agency, having contacts at local organizations is important. However, a limited number knew about my program. Now, as a program of JFS, with its reach throughout the community, more organizations and individuals will be familiar with Mitzvah Meals, and it will reach a wider referral base than I was able to reach alone.
Eighty percent of the volunteers came from my home synagogue, Congregation Beth Shalom. JFS has access to many more volunteers that I did. I am one of them! This type of opportunity is attractive because of its flexibility— volunteers can schedule online and participate when and how often they would like. I hope if you’re reading this, you’ll consider signing up.
I intend to stay actively involved with Mitzvah Meals as a volunteer as long as I am able. I feel that JFS is the right place for the program, and I look forward to helping grow the number of community volunteers, as well as the number of Jewish families facing difficult situations far away from home who we can help by bringing them nourishing food and a friendly face.
To learn more, get involved as a volunteer, or request help view our flyer here or email us at mitzvahmeals@jfsseattle.org.
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