Once upon a time, Gideon Ben-Ami brought Israeli musicians to Carnegie Hall in Manhattan. Today he brings fresh food to a shelter for drug-addicted streetwalkers in Tel Aviv.

The former impresario, restaurateur and alternative-energy executive also delivers sandwiches to homeless men, fruit to migrant children, medicine to a refugee clinic, toys and food to a battered-women’s shelter and diapers to destitute young parents and elderly Holocaust survivors.

“There are a million poor people here,” Ben-Ami tells ISRAEL21c as he drives his little white van through the shabby streets of South Tel Aviv. “We can’t reach them all. We are reaching people who are in the worst possible situation.”

The goodhearted 69-year-old grandfather casts a ray of light on a bleak landscape. He knows everybody’s stories and tries to fill their needs. Among the items stashed in the van today are expensive pressure stockings for an African man and woman burned in a grisly arson attack.

“The main thing is food, produce and money to help people recover from overwhelming tragedies, like the couple who was burned,” he says. “But there are smaller cases that are just as tragic, and existing charities don’t have the wherewithal to help them all.”

A messenger

For decades, Ben-Ami owned and managed a popular chain of eateries in Miami and Israel. It killed him to see how much food is tossed out by restaurants, bakeries and caterers. After he retired, he handed out sandwiches to homeless people in Tel Aviv.

When African refugees and migrants began flooding South Tel Aviv a couple of years ago, Ben-Ami volunteered to manage a humanitarian program, bringing rescued food to the makeshift tent city set up by the municipality in Levinsky Park.

A volunteer for the New Jersey-based Good People Fund observed Ben-Ami at Levinsky and recruited him to continue his charitable work with the fund’s support. He was delighted to devote himself full time to something he finds so rewarding.

“I’m basically a shaliach [messenger],” he explains. “The essence of what I do is taking things from one point and bringing them to another, knowing when to pick up and what to pick up because there is so much out there. It’s a small program with many facets.”

He coordinates his activities with other charities including Leket Israel, the national food bank. Ben-Ami delivers tons of Leket’s rescued food and gleaned produce to homeless shelters, battered-women’s shelters, prisoner halfway houses and African daycare centers.

He stores some of the produce in an alcove next to a publicly funded safe house where homeless and drug-addicted women working the streets can shower, grab a bite and sleep in a real bed. This project was formerly managed by his ex-wife, Manya, an addictions counselor and recovery coach.

A nearby commercial building houses Turning the Tables, where women in recovery learn marketable design and fashion skills. On our outing, Ben-Ami takes them some of the sandwiches he’s just picked up at the regional police headquarters near Jaffa.

At least once a week, Ben-Ami pulls his van to the station’s loading dock to receive hundreds of leftover sandwiches boxed up by Officer Eyal Raviv. Sometimes he brings Raviv food packages to take to a destitute family in another city.

“He’s one of a kind. I can only say good words about this man,” Raviv tells ISRAEL21c. Until he and Ben-Ami paired up, the leftover sandwiches were thrown away.

Nowhere to play

Today, some of these sandwiches will help fill bellies at Felicia’s daycare for African children. In this overcrowded and barebones facility, 17 preschoolers crowd around to shake Ben-Ami’s hand and shout “Shalom!” Clearly, the brief visit brightens their day. Ben-Ami calls it “a moment of kindness.”

Felicia doesn’t have a play yard. Once a week, volunteers travel down from Zichron Yaakov to take the youngsters to the park. They work with Ben-Ami to fill a variety of social-welfare gaps in South Tel Aviv through what he calls micro-charity.

A doctor in the group collected medicine samples from her colleagues for Ben-Ami to take to the migrant clinic in the Central Bus Station. Her daughter arranged with Ben-Ami to repair a decrepit daycare with a bunch of her friends. They collect cash to supplement the rent of an Eritrean migrant, Marhawi, whose wife hung herself and left him with two babies. When the older child was in the hospital recently, the group lined up visitors.

Ben-Ami stops at Levinksy Park to pick up a member of the group who has taken Marhawi and his children under her wing. “Every month I’ve been coming down to spend a couple of hours with Gideon helping where I can,” she tells ISRAEL21c.

The volunteers are sometimes heckled as they accompany African children to the park. Ben-Ami can’t understand this. “The Bible commands us about 36 times to care for the stranger. If we are to be a light unto the nations, we need to set an example.”

Caring for others is in Ben-Ami’s DNA. Back in Russia, his grandmother Pesia ran a soup kitchen out of her home for students at the esteemed Volozhin Yeshiva. When poor neighbors borrowed her oven to warm their simple bean stews, she’d slip a piece of meat into the pot.

Born in Israel, Ben-Ami lived in the United States from the age of 12 until the oldest of his own four children was 12. Throughout his long and varied career, he confides, he made and lost millions. Now he is content living a life immersed in charity work.

“I discovered life is so much more beautiful and enriching if you live with voluntary simplicity, and that’s what I want my children to see.”

It seems they’ve taken his example to heart. Several times a week, one of his sons helps with the deliveries. His daughter recently asked him to help her distribute foodstuffs she collected for Holocaust survivors.

Ben-Ami always thinks of new ways to help the downtrodden. He supplied industrial-size pots to eight Tel Aviv women to make soup every week for homeless shelters. He wants to rent a storefront and turn it into a takeout soup kitchen. He finds dishwashing and table-busing jobs for down-on-their luck locals, thanks to his restaurant connections.

“Gideon’s greatest delight comes from feeding hungry people,” says The Good People Fund Executive Director Naomi Eisenberger. “He also has an uncanny ability to discover the poorest and most overlooked people hidden in Tel Aviv’s bustling metropolis. For those fortunate enough to meet him, life can improve dramatically.”

Messenger of mercy in South Tel Aviv _ ISRAEL21c

When “Noam” agreed to work at Kaima, an Israeli organic farm employing kids who have dropped out of school, he was just shy of 15, clinically depressed, doing drugs and distrustful of adults.

Within four months, Noam had stopped abusing drugs. He had gained physical strength and began working once a week with a Kaima mentor to research and design a more efficient method for packing and weighing cherry tomatoes. Now he is starting night school to get his high-school diploma.

“We thought we could give these kids something beyond what they get in sessions with a social worker or psychologist,” Kaima founder Yoni Yefet-Reich tells ISRAEL21c about the unique program he started in December 2012. “We were amazed to see how fast our method works.”

That method is based on giving kids responsibility, listening to them and showing them new possibilities for their future. “The real ‘treatment’ at Kaima happens in the field, when we are simply planting cucumbers or picking tomatoes together and having conversations. When you work with youth it’s all about trust. And to gain their trust you have to be there with them,” says Yefet-Reich.

The 15- to 18-year-olds who choose to join Kaima — upon the suggestion of welfare agencies in greater Jerusalem — work one-on-one with staff members and/or adult volunteers for a few months, a year or more.

They earn an hourly wage to plant, tend and harvest as many as 30 different kinds of vegetables destined for 150 customers on Kaima’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) plan. Kaima distribution centers have been opened in Jerusalem’s German Colony and in the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens, too.

In addition to organic agriculture, the teens are learning a work ethic applicable to any career. One important aspect is arriving on time at 7:30 every morning on their own steam.

“The welfare authorities at first said we’d have to arrange transportation for the kids, and we said, ‘No way.’ We didn’t want to give them the feeling that they’re part of a charity project,” explains Yefet-Reich. “We wanted them to take greater responsibility for themselves.”

Striving for sustainability

Kaima, an Aramaic word for “sustainability,” was conceptualized by Yefet-Reich, a lawyer by training and a graduate of the Ein Kerem Community Environmental School. He earned a master’s degree in nonprofit management from the Hebrew University while heading the informal education program at Reut, a pluralistic religious high school in Jerusalem.

After 10 years at Reut, he gathered a group of teachers, social workers, organic farmers and other young social entrepreneurs interested in creating a farm as a safe place for troubled youth in the Jerusalem area.

On the Beit Zayit moshav (cooperative village) just west of the city, where Yefet-Reich is a third-generation resident, each family has a small plot for agriculture. He asked members who weren’t using their plots if they’d donate them to his project. He ended up with three acres of land. Via Facebook, the group recruited 70 volunteers to come and clear rocks from the soil. By April 2013, the first seeds were sown, and in June a successful pilot was launched.

“The day after we started to publicize that we were selling CSA boxes, we had 40 customers,” relates Yefet-Reich. “A week later we had 60, and now we have 150. We’re not looking for a lot more.”

Income from sales now accounts for 38 percent of Kaima’s budget. “Eventually, we want to get to 60 or 70% income from selling the crops,” Yefet-Reich says. “We are an NGO striving for greater self-sustainability.”

For the initial few years, he aims to cover about one-third of expenses from sales, one-third from government agencies and one-third from philanthropies. The first donor was The Good People Fund in the United States, and other support has come from foundations in Israel, Luxembourg and England.

“We want to give the youth with whom we work the power to understand that life is full of things to learn and that exercising one’s curiosity and taking greater responsibility can make all the difference,” says Yefet-Reich.

“We won’t push them to go back to school, but we’ll push them to find a way to be productive. Whether or not they go back to school, they all benefit.”

Dropout teens blossom at unique organic farm _ ISRAEL21c

Over the past five years, Rick Nahmias has been able to feed millions of people in need, and, the founder of Food Forward says, it all started with an orange.

In 2009, Nahmias was walking around the neighborhood with his dog when he saw “a great amount of fruit trees that weren’t being harvested.” A friend of his, in particular, had a tangerine tree and an orange tree, but only used a few of each for herself and her daughter. Through his work as a documentary photographer, Nahmias saw first-hand how many communities were in need, and that sparked the idea to harvest his friend’s fruit and donate it to a local food bank.

“That was kind of a watershed moment,” the nonprofit founder said. “I saw the opportunity to connect need with abundance.”

Nahmias launched his first harvest in 2009 with the help of just one other volunteer. Together they gathered 85 pounds of tangerines in a few short hours. Less than a month later, he enlisted 50 people on another harvest, which yielded 5,000 pounds of oranges that would have otherwise rotted. Now with three core programs in place, Food Forward recovers and donates 4 million pounds of food each year.

According to the Nahmias, a native Californian, local trees produce hundreds of pounds of fruit, much of which would go to waste. Now it’s Food Forward’s mission to make sure that this excess produce is being used to provide nutritious meals for the hungry. Nahmias added, “The feeling is with this organization is that we have the solution within our own means to maybe not solve hunger, but to fight it.”

At 62, Esther Macner radiates feistiness and confidence.

During a recent interview at the Journal’s headquarters, she described herself as an “Orthodox Jewish feminist, which I’ve been all my life, before the word became a label.”

A former prosecutor and trial attorney in New York, Macner moved to Los Angeles just five years ago and is now poised to become an increasingly important presence in the Los Angeles Modern Orthodox world.  Her focus is the crisis of women, known as agunot — literally “anchored” —  who are stuck in dead marriages, unable to make their estranged husbands grant them a Jewish divorce decree, known as a get. Less than one year ago, the mother of two and grandmother of two established the nonprofit Get Jewish Divorce Justice to advocate for these women who are unable to remarry without risking their status within their faith community.

For Macner, the issue is deeply personal. She believes the Jewish legal system enabling the creation of agunot is “an embarrassment to me and a painful blemish on my identity.”

And while an agunah cannot remarry or have more children beyond those she had with her husband, he, if he can obtain the permission of 100 rabbis, is allowed to take a new wife and create a new family.

To that end, Get Jewish Divorce Justice, along with several area rabbis, is organizing an event called “Retying the Knot, Unchaining the Agunah,” at which Orthodox married couples will sign postnuptial agreements, a legal vow to be fair to one another should they ever decide to divorce.

The agunah issue took the local limelight last March, when a group of Angelenos, including a few prominent Modern Orthodox leaders, traveled to Las Vegas to stage a rally at the second marriage of a former L.A. resident, Israeli Meir Kin, who was continuing to refuse a get to his first wife, Lonna Kin. The Jewish Journal ran a cover story about the Kins headlined “Till Get Do Us Part.”

Macner’s mission with her fledgling organization is to let women caught in such marriages know that her group is a resource for help.

In the Orthodox community, postnuptial agreements can be created by couples who never entered into halachic prenuptial agreements before getting married, and the documents obligate married couples to settle a divorce in a reputable rabbinic court, among other things.

Corrupt rabbinic courts have been part of what leads to agunah cases, Macner said, by allowing the husband to find ways to escape the marriage for himself — or sometimes even to attempt to extort money from the former wife.

Many of the L.A. rabbis who participated in the Las Vegas rally, including Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky of B’nai David-Judea Congregation; Rabbi Kalman Topp of Beth Jacob Congregation; and Rabbi Ari Segal, Shalhevet’s head of school, are among those participating in Sunday’s event.

Rabbi Elazar Muskin of Young Israel of Century City also will be at the event.

Rabbi Yona Reiss, a member of the Chicago Rabbinical Council, will present a talk titled “The Origin and the Urgency of the Halachic Pre-Nuptial Agreement.”

More than 450 agunot are believed to live in the United States.

Part of the problem is that there is no official registry of agunot keeping a count, Rabbi Jeremy Stern, executive director of the Organization for the Resolution of Agunot (ORA), which organized the Las Vegas action, said in an interview at the time of that rally.

Here in Los Angeles, Macner is currently seeking volunteers for a task force that will reach out to “agunot who are in need of assistance,” a recent email from her organization said.

Macner told the Journal that her efforts to raise awareness about agunot, including integrating prayers for agunot into the tehillim(psalms) readings at synagogues, have successfully helped resolve the cases of several women.

Get Jewish Divorce Justice, with just two staff and no office space, is smaller than the better-known ORA, but its goals are similar — the “prevention of abuse in the Jewish divorce process, through education, advocacy and individual counseling,” an online biography for Macner reads.

Macner said she views herself as a “liaison” among the rabbinic community, the victims, and the rabbinic courts, which often don’t work together in ways that might lead to resolving agunah cases, she said. For instance, women are not always comfortable discussing their situations with the male rabbis of the rabbinic courts, she said. Being an insider and understanding these issues helps her, she said: “I’ve always been Orthodox, and I have always worked from within the community.”

Macner said she is also interested in forming a support group for women who have undergone these challenges to focus on healing through the arts. She is working to create a theater piece telling real women’s stories, which she called “The Agunah Monologues.”

Macner draws on her experience as a trial attorney and divorce mediator, specializing in “family law, domestic violence and rabbinic court representation,” according to her biography. She is a graduate of Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, received a master’s degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary and a bachelor’s degree from Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Macner and her husband, Chaim Plotzker, live in Pico-Robertson. She jokingly describes the union as a “mixed marriage” — she attends services at B’nai-David Judea, and he attends Young Israel of Century City.

Together they also attend the Happy Minyan, a Shlomo Carlebach-style congregation, she said.

Prior to taking on the agunah issue, Macner worked as an advocate for the advancement of women in Orthodox circles, including creating a shul in 1980 where women read from the Torah and said Kiddush, and where young girls sang Adon Olam. 

As she made her way out of the Journal’s office, where the interview took place, a final question from a reporter stopped her in her tracks.

“Why be Orthodox if you’re a woman today?”

Macner admitted to having some differences with the Orthodox community, in particular the way its laws can marginalize women.

But she said she can’t “divorce” herself from living a life based on halachah, disagree with it though she might.

“It’s too high a price to pay to have someone deny their identity,” Macner said. “If something is wrong, you need to change it from within.”

 Esther Macner_ Agunah advocate promotes post-nuptials _ Lifestyle _ Jewish Journal