Better Together

by Jill Cousins

It’s 5:30 on a Monday evening in downtown Orlando, and Judy Godorov and Richard Schwartz are getting ready to serve dinner. But these are no ordinary meals.

Judy is overseeing a handful of volunteers from the Congregation of Reform Judaism (CRJ), as they get ready to dish out more than 100 servings of the synagogue’s special recipe pasta and meat casserole. Richard is making sure that his volunteers from Congregation Ohev Shalom are ready to serve more than 200 portions of pasta with marinara sauce and roasted potatoes.

For more than 20 years, both Judy and Richard have been serving dinner once a month at the Coalition for the Homeless of Central Florida. Judy coordinates the schedule for CRJ’s volunteers, who serve residents in the Coalition’s Center for Women & Families. In a separate building on the other side of the Coalition’s parking lot on North Terry Avenue, Richard spearheads Ohev Shalom’s volunteers.

It’s truly a labor of love for Judy and Richard and the countless volunteers who have assisted them over the years.

“I started out as a volunteer, and a few years later, I became the coordinator,” says Judy, a former kindergarten teacher who has dedicated herself to volunteer work since retiring more than 20 years ago. “I look forward to doing this every month. I know that it’s necessary. I like seeing the looks on their faces; they really appreciate the help we give them, and that makes it all worthwhile.”

Richard, a Maitland resident who owns a commercial printing company, also started off as a volunteer, and his role expanded over the years. He now coordinates a group of more than 20 Ohev Shalom members who cook and serve dinner to between 200 and 250 men every third Monday night, with the exception of dates that conflict with Passover in the spring and the High Holy Days in the fall.

“Unfortunately, there is a need to feed the homeless and take care of them, in our community and worldwide,” Richard says. “I just want to be part of the solution. If I do my part, and Ohev does its part, and CRJ does its part, others will follow suit, and we can make a big impact. When we all group together, great things can happen.”

Tracing the beginnings of this coordinated effort is no easy task. Most sources agree that the program started at CRJ and Ohev Shalom nearly 30 years ago when the Coalition took over the former WFTV-Channel 9 building on Central Boulevard back in 1990. Ohev Shalom members Saul and Leah Zatz “birthed the whole concept of feeding the homeless,” according to Richard. CRJ members, including Judy, had already started volunteering to help the homeless years before the current complex opened.

Former CRJ president Marty Glickstein, who still volunteers with wife Emily, recalls his synagogue first got involved with helping the homeless in the early 1980s. A Methodist church in downtown Orlando was housing several homeless people and needed volunteers to spend the night there with them after hours.

Judy was one of those volunteers.

“The homeless people needed a place to sleep,” Judy says, “and they were looking for volunteers to stay in the room and keep the peace.”

A few years later, as Judy recalls, the city’s homeless population moved to a small bus terminal on Hughey Avenue, where residents were able to take showers, but no food was served. At the current Coalition location, volunteers – mostly from local churches – provide dinner every night of the year. Even Orlando Magic basketball players get in on the act, feeding the Coalition residents on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

At both CRJ and Ohev Shalom, the Feeding the Homeless programs are like well-oiled machines. At CRJ, volunteers cook 60 pounds of ground beef to make 12 large trays of its signature main course, and the synagogue also donates industrial-size cans of vegetables and fruit along with cookies and lemonade.

Ohev Shalom’s volunteers include three or four gatherers, who collect donated food from Second Harvest Food Bank, Publix, and some local bakeries. In addition to their main course, they also serve garden salad, steamed mixed veggies, fruit salad, and a wide array of breads and pastries.

“It’s an ungodly amount of food,” Richard says. “Typically, it’s more than we need. So we leave the leftovers for the Coalition to use at another time.”

Shelley Taylor has been one of CRJ’s kitchen coordinators for nearly 20 years. She began volunteering with her sons, who had their bar mitzvahs in 2002 and 2003.

“It was their mitzvah projects, and I just stayed with it,” Shelley says. “Food has always been my thing, for one. I love cooking, and I hate for people to go hungry. It’s just a normal thing that anyone would do.”

That’s also Judy’s attitude. Now a resident of the Oakmonte Village senior-living community in Lake Mary, she says volunteerism has always been a part of her life. Even when she was a teacher, Judy was always looking for ways to help students in need. She’d save leftover milk cartons from lunchtime and send them home with students for the weekend. She helped start a program at CRJ called Sneakers That Fit to collect shoes for young students during the holidays. Judy is also a breast-cancer survivor, and for many years she did breast-cancer walks and collected donations.

“Judy and I go back a long way,” Richard says. “I think she will be doing this until she is physically incapable. She loves it as much as I do. It means so much to her to be a part of this program.”

Richard points out that when CRJ finishes serving the Coalition’s women and children, usually about half-an-hour before Ohev Shalom is done feeding the men, Judy always walks over to the men’s building, seeks out Richard to say hello, and chats with him about their favorite sport: tennis.

“What we do here is a whole big concerted effort,” Richard says. “It’s a feel-good thing, it really is.”