In a city of undisputed abundance, it is hard to believe that *20,000 of Toronto’s Jews, including 3,050 children and 6,000 seniors, are living below the poverty line. Many of these people live in hunger without the money to buy sufficient food to feed themselves and their families. Many are too proud to seek assistance.
Link Yad Chesed was formed to help fight hunger in Toronto’s Jewish community by providing food coupons to Jewish individuals and families in need.
Link is focused on helping those in our community who, as a result of personal or social circumstances, are in need of our assistance. Our goal is to provide them with the ability to purchase food and other related essentials, while helping them access other forms of social assistance – ultimately enabling them to break the cycle of poverty and hunger.
We hope you will work with us to feed the hungry in our community.
It all started about nine years ago, when our founder learned about a Jewish family in her neighborhood that required food. Privately, she began to provide them with the food they needed. However, the community’s needs were greater then she knew. Rabbis and other synagogue leaders began asking for assistance for their congregants. School principals began to confide that many Jewish children could not afford to bring lunch to school. And, out of this need, Link Yad Chesed was born.
At first, we began with grassroots efforts to feed families on an ad hoc basis. Food depots were set up across the city, with friends collecting and packaging food for weekly distribution to as many as 40 families across the GTA. Soon, a group of volunteers began to collect funds to purchase groceries, while other volunteers delivered food each week.
Over the years the entirely privately-funded effort has succeeded in helping hundreds of people on an annual basis, providing Jewish families and individuals with both physical and spiritual nourishment.
* “Hope for Tomorrow Symposium”, preparatory research and interview findings, December 2003, UJA Federation in partnership with Jewish communal agencies
If there be among you a poor person, one of your relatives within your gates in the land which G-d gives you, you shall not harden your heart, nor shut your hand from the poor relative; but you shall open your hand wide to him, and shall surely lend enough for his need, for what he lacks.
- Deuteronomy, 15:7-8
