Whether seen as mitzvah or messianic mandate, hot Sunday meals fulfill basic human needs for sustenance and love.
By EILEEN SCHULTE
Published May 15, 2004
TARPON SPRINGS - Rabbi Stephen Moch was troubled.
He knew that whole families lived in campsites in the woods under dirty tarps just a few miles from his synagogue on Keystone Road.
He worried that they had nothing to eat.
So in February as he prepared for Mitzvah Day Across the Bay, an annual day of good deeds in the Jewish community, Moch called the Shepherds Center of Tarpon Springs and asked its executive director how he could help.
Bill Vasiliou leads the center, which provides meals, clothes and other social services to families from Dunedin north to Holiday. Vasiliou told Moch that the only day people can't get a hot meal in Tarpon Springs was Sunday, something that had worried him.
The pair decided to open a soup kitchen on that day, but because Moch's congregation was 4 miles out of town and has little more than a microwave to cook with, they needed a church facility with a refrigerator, stove and other essentials.
The first pastor Vasiliou had in mind declined an invitation to work with a non-Christian group.
But the Rev. Herbert Hollingsworth of Mount Moriah AME Church accepted the offer immediately.
Casting aside religious differences and heeding the call to help the less fortunate, the predominantly black Mount Moriah and Congregation B'nai Emmunah have united to feed the city's hungriest people every Sunday in the sanctuary's kitchen.
"We've talked about it for years, but this is the first time we've ever done anything like this," Hollingsworth said.
This is also the first time the Shepherds Center has worked with a synagogue, Vasiliou said.
Moch's motive was simple: "I just want people to know God is caring for them."
The kitchen opened three weeks ago, and word that food is available at the church is still making its way to an estimated 2,000 homeless people in Pinellas County, as well as the working poor.
"The first week, we had oodles of volunteers," said Moch. "We had as many volunteers as clients - about 20. It was slow, but it was a start."
Synagogue program chairwoman Fran Weiser of East Lake Woodlands and her corps of volunteers used food supplied by the Shepherds Center to make a meal of ground turkey with a red sauce over rice, "nothing fancy," she said. Her husband, Bernard, a retired engineer, made a large salad with chopped vegetables.
"We have a little extra time," she said. "I've been wanting to do something with a soup kitchen for some time."
She said the volunteers served the food from a counter and that the clients "thanked us" and "said it was very tasty."
Vasiliou says that most needy people who use the soup kitchens in the area are not homeless, but working poor. With the federal minimum wage at $5.10 an hour, they cannot make ends meet.
"One of the hardest things is when a man who has worked all his life comes in," he said. "One came in (one time). I shake his hand and it's calloused. He was a laborer. He had tears in his eyes and he said, "I never thought I'd ever have to come to a place like this.' He said, "I'll pay you back.' And they do. We find $10 and $20 in the donation box."
When an affluent, middle- or working-class person loses a job or gets sick and begins to descend into poverty, "It's like falling down the stairs in slow motion," Vasiliou said.
"You see what's happening, you grab hold of the banister, but you keep going down," he said. "Once you are down, getting on your feet can be excruciating, so difficult it leads to despair."
In Judaism there is no proselytizing, so Moch and his volunteers do not promote God to their clients.
But in Christianity, any chance to save a soul is a good one.
"Of course, being a preacher, I take the opportunity to discuss his standing with the maker," Hollingsworth said with a laugh.
