Ray MacDonald: Hello and welcome. Once again, we’re joined by Joseph Gitler, the founder of Leket Israel, the national food bank and a leading food rescue organization. Joseph originally hails from New York City and made Aliyah, returning home to Israel with his family in 2000. He has a background as a lawyer but is now dedicated to assisting Israel’s needy. Joseph has also been recognized in the Jerusalem Post’s “50 most influential Jews in the world.” It’s great to have you with us again,
Joseph Gitler: Thank you, Raymond, for the opportunity to be on today.
Ray MacDonald: So, Leket Israel is a food rescue organization. You rescue surplus food in Israel and supply it to around 300 nonprofit organizations that work with the poor, including food banks, soup kitchens, and senior citizen facilities. This is all the brainchild of Joseph, and it’s exciting.
My wife and I were actually in Israel on October 7th, 2023. It was a very difficult moment, obviously. But for me personally, Joseph, it was an honor to experience just a tiny snapshot of what Israelis were experiencing that day and what they have been experiencing for many years, perhaps even since the inception of the modern state in 1948.
Leket quickly scrambled, retooled, and went into action as Israel was going through this very difficult moment. Tell me a little bit about it.
Joseph Gitler: I can definitely understand where you’re coming from. That was certainly the most difficult day any of us could have ever imagined. I’m so proud of what our team has done since October 7th, and specifically on the 7th itself. That Saturday night, we were already on a Zoom call with the organization’s management, understanding that everything we normally do probably wouldn’t be relevant Sunday morning.
That’s because hotels weren’t going to be operating, and IDF bases wouldn’t be open for us to pick up food. With all the rockets, no one was going to be working; everyone would be at home. So, corporate cafeterias wouldn’t be open, and there would be no events. And of course, there was tremendous damage on October 7th to agriculture in the south, which then spread to the north.
We knew that night that our regular operations had to change. We don’t consider ourselves an emergency food program; we are a food rescue organization, which means we do what we do, and we do it well. We hope for normal times so that we don’t have to change our operations, but unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case much over the last five years.
So, we had two choices. One was to say there was nothing we could do and wave the white flag. But of course, no one at our meeting that Saturday night had that in mind at all. It was, “Okay, life has changed. We’re going to change with it.” It was obvious to us what we needed to do. We needed to go out to the marketplace and tell our donors that the way we normally work, for the time being, is not relevant.
We were going to need a lot more money—tens of millions of dollars more—to replace what had been lost. That meant purchasing food and cooked meals. That meant purchasing produce from hard-hit farmers because the people we serve still needed help. And of course, in every emergency situation, there are a lot more people who need help, perhaps only temporarily, but when they need it, they need it. So, we needed to spring into action quickly, which we did.
Since October 7th, our relationship with the farming community has changed dramatically. We’ve done so many more things to help farmers, including sending tens of thousands of volunteers to help farmers who would normally give their crops to Leket. But this time we said to them, “No, we’re recruiting the volunteers. We’re paying for the buses. You keep the crops. If you can’t sell them, call us. We’ll buy them.” In addition, we have multiple loan funds for farmers, and we’ve put together a very large foundation for helping farmers replace damaged equipment.
So, a lot of activity, a lot of action, unfortunately, for emergency purposes, and as we speak, that still continues. We’re still in an emergency, and there’s still a lot of suffering. Just to give you one last example, today we decided that we’re doing a survey of reservist families in Israel who may need help. We are now scouring all the agencies in Israel that work with soldiers who are serving in the reserves, many of whom serve for hundreds of days, in order to assess who might need some extra help. And then we will be providing food cards for those families for the high holidays so they can go and feed their families in dignity.
Ray MacDonald: Wow, that’s exciting to see how flexible the organization has been. The traditional model of farms giving to Leket to redistribute to the needy has almost reversed to Leket now assisting farmers.
Joseph Gitler: Yes, it has been. We hate to do it, but we do it whenever we need to.
Ray MacDonald: You know, in so much of the media coverage in the immediate aftermath of the terror attack from Gaza, what was lost and what was not depicted is how Israel’s agricultural sector was so impacted. The region around Gaza is the area of the greatest production of vegetables consumed by Israelis.
The King of Thailand recalled his foreign nationals to come back, and overnight Israel lost a significant portion of its agricultural workforce. Infrastructure, tractors, and irrigation systems were destroyed. And then in the north, where you have predominantly citrus and nut agriculture, it was very much disrupted by rocket fire from southern Lebanon. This put farmers and Israelis consuming food in a very precarious situation.
Joseph Gitler: Certainly, it’s been a very difficult 20 months since the war started. The good news is, in many ways, farming is back to normal. Our biggest issue today is still the lack of foreign workers. Many have returned, and it is much safer now than it was. There were some bad incidents, unfortunately, not just on October 7th but afterwards. But from what we understand from farmers, there’s still about a 40% shortage of farm workers.
The farmers appreciate us and they love the tens of thousands of volunteers. What they really want is just to get back to normal, run their farms like they normally do, sell like they normally do, and donate like they normally do. But we’re still in the midst of this. And until a lot of people see quiet for a very long time, it may be hard to attract people to come back and help with the farming.
Ray MacDonald: In the meantime, Leket has been assisting with tens of thousands of volunteers. In a typical year, you have around 70,000 or so volunteers assisting.
Joseph Gitler: Yeah, that’s about right. It’s probably been 50% more than that, if not even greater, since October 7th. And that’s through thick and thin. That’s through limitations on where volunteers could go, how close to the border with Gaza, at least in the first few months. There were limitations on how many people we could have working in our distribution center because we needed to keep it limited. It’s so crazy to even talk about these things, but that’s our reality right now. We needed to limit the number of volunteers who could come to the distribution center in case there was a siren because we needed to get them all into the shelter.
So, if the shelter can hold 40, you can’t have more than 40 people there. And that limited our activities. That’s been painful throughout the last year and a half plus. But the volunteer spirit that we felt from Israelis and from so many overseas visitors who really have had to struggle to even make it to Israel with the limitations on flights and the concern about maybe their return flight will be canceled, people have still been coming in droves. It’s dedicated people. It’s not a tourist destination right now, unfortunately. I wish it was.
For those of you who do come visit, if you go to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, you’re not going to feel like we’re in the middle of a war, which I think is very, very important. My own son, a soldier, called me at the beginning of the war and said, “It’s very important that people go out to eat. It’s very important that people live life as hard as it is to imagine. That’s what we’re fighting for. We’re fighting for freedom. We’re fighting for democracy. We’re fighting for our homeland. And really, what we’re fighting for is quiet.” It sometimes doesn’t seem realistic for a Jewish person to say we want quiet, but it feels like after thousands of years, the time has come for the world to cut us a little break. But I don’t know. I’ll keep at it because I can’t count on that.
Ray MacDonald: Well, we’re rooting for you. Evangelical Christians are behind Israel. Joseph, I encourage Christians to sha’alu shalom Yerushalayim—to pray for the peace of Jerusalem as the psalmist proclaimed. I encourage Christians to visit the land of Israel. It’s truly a life-changing experience; the Bible really comes to life. And Leket provides that opportunity for Christians to be involved and to volunteer, to get some Holy Land soil under your fingernails.
But also, if you can’t visit Israel, you can support Israel with your giving. Please visit our website, christianfriendsof.org. I’ll provide the link below. You can be involved, you can be a part of what Hashem, what the Lord, is doing in the land of Israel. Joseph, before you go, what are the pressing needs for Leket right now? What area do we need to be praying for and getting behind financially?
Joseph Gitler: I would say two key areas right now. One is help for those who lost their homes. There are still about 7,000 Israelis who are out of their homes. They’re not homeless because they’ve been put up in hotels and apartments, but of course, they’ve been left with nothing. So we’re part of that picture, trying to help them by providing food and other items where needed. Support for that area is definitely helpful.
And I would say also, for this period of the year, for the upcoming holidays, helping our reservists who’ve fallen on hard times. Many of them have been serving for hundreds of days, especially those who had their own businesses. You know, it’s one thing if you worked in a company, so hopefully that company can take care of you. But if you had your own dry cleaning business or your own taxi service and you’ve been in the reserves, you are getting some income from the reserves, but never what you had before. So, we’re looking to help families like that as well. And those are both wonderful areas that people who can be supportive can be very helpful.
Ray MacDonald: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Joseph. We pray for your peace and safety, your well-being, for yourself, your family, Leket Israel, and all of Israel. God bless you. Thank you so much for being with us.
Joseph Gitler: Thank you.