Jewish and Muslim Israelis cater meals for needy children
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Jewish, Muslim Israelis cater meals for needy kids

  • 1/24/2017
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    ​Cooking Coexistence gives marginalized Muslim and Jewish women over the age of 35 employment and work skills. The social enterprise also helps to foster inter-religious friendships and it provides nutrition to underprivileged kids. “The ripple effect that most people don’t realize is what Cooking Coexistence means to the Jewish employees who have never worked with Arabs, and to Arabs who have never worked with Jews.”
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    Cooking Coexistence staff Cooking Coexistence staff Copyright: Israel21c
     
     
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    By Abigail Klein Leichman and originally published on Israel21c.
     
    With a sparkle in her eye, a traditionally garbed Arab-Israeli mother asked to speak at a recent employee meeting of Cooking Coexistence (“Tavshil Hevrati” in Hebrew), a social business in northern Israel where she’d started her very first job outside the home some six weeks previously.
     
    “We have five children and my husband earns 5,000 shekels [$1,300] a month. My salary from Cooking Coexistence now enables me to buy new clothes for my children and to pay for sending them to afterschool activities,” the woman said, as other women in the group nodded in agreement.
     
    “I had tears in my eyes; it was a very emotional moment,” recalls Allan Chanoch Barkat, founder and chairman of the Dualis Social Investment Fund, which sponsors Cooking Coexistence and other social businesses in Israel.
     
    Cooking Coexistence is an institutional catering business that trains and employs Arab and Jewish women over the age of 35 whom government agencies have identified as chronically underemployed or unemployed.
     
    Started about 18 months ago in a kitchen facility at Kibbutz Givat Chaim near Hadera, Cooking Coexistence supplies meals to underprivileged Arab and Jewish Israeli preschoolers and grade-schoolers through the government’s National School Lunch Program.
     
    Read the full article here