Celebrating 30 Years of Giving at Temple Shalom

Thirty years ago, the Union for Reform Judaism, an organization that represents Reform synagogues across North America, encouraged congregations to run food drives during the High Holidays—a time of reflection, repentance, and renewal in the Jewish calendar that includes Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). That’s when the Social and Environmental Action Committee at Temple Shalom, a synagogue in Waterloo, organized their first food drive in support of The Food Bank of Waterloo Region, calling it the High Holidays Hunger Project.

“We’d start on Rosh Hashanah,” says Mark Pancer, a member at Temple Shalom who has been chairing and co-chairing the Social and Environmental Action Committee since the 1990s. “We’d announce it and have big fanfare, and people would bring bags of food to the synagogue and leave them in the front hallway. There were bags and bags and bags. We collected right until the end of Yom Kippur. Then we would pile the bags in vans and cars and take them down to The Food Bank.”

After that first food drive, Temple Shalom faithfully collected food for The Food Bank every year during the High Holidays until the COVID-19 pandemic made it challenging to collect food safely, leading them to raise funds instead. Raising funds has been their focus ever since.

“It just fits with our values because it fills such an important need in the community,” Mark explains. “Tzedakah which means charity, tikkun olam which means repairing the world, and doing mitzvot which are good deeds… those are all things that we feel very strongly about as Jews, and we feel especially strongly about them as Reform Jews because social justice is such an important concept in Reform Judaism. It’s especially important during the High Holidays because that’s when we reflect on what we’ve done over the past year and what we haven’t done over the past year in terms of not only individual interactions but also in terms of what we’ve done or haven’t done to help repair the world and to make our community a better place.”

The Social and Environmental Action Committee. Left, Ernie Ginsler, Ruth Shushan, Judy Ginsler, Norm Finkelberg, Mark Pancer, Shawn Wasserman, and Tina Hang.