Tikkun Olam: Thanksgiving 2021 Breakfast Bags

Continuing Temple Emanu-El’s long history of Tikkun Olam efforts around Thanksgiving, members of our community came together on Wednesday, November 17, 2021 to assemble 550 Thanksgiving Breakfast bags for the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House. The bags contain 14 items, close to over 8,000 units.

Traditionally, Temple Emanu-El hosts an Annual Thanksgiving Dinner at the temple (on the day before the holiday) for 225 senior citizens and women and children from local homeless and domestic violence shelters. Due to health concerns, Temple Emanu-El has been unable to host our guests in 2020 and 2021, but has continued serve those in need within our community throughout the pandemic. With each volunteer set up at their own socially distant station within Wise Hall, volunteers worked in tandem to assemble the 550 Thanksgiving Bags.

Temple Emanu-El will also be assembling 215 Thanksgiving Breakfast Bags for The Isaacs Center and Neighborhood Coalition for Shelter on Sunday, November 21 at 1:00 PM.

Lenox Hill Neighborhood House, widely recognized as one of New York’s premier nonprofit organizations, is a 126-year-old settlement house that provides an extensive array of effective and integrated human services—social, educational, legal, health, housing, mental health, nutritional and fitness—which significantly improve the lives of thousands of people in need each year, ages 3 to 103, on the East Side of Manhattan.

Neighborhood Coalition for Shelter (NCS) helps New Yorkers who are struggling with homelessness, often compounded by mental illness or substance use, to achieve their highest level of independence. Established in 1982 by faith and community leaders on Manhattan’s Upper East Side who believed that homelessness is the responsibility of the entire community, more than 35 years later, NCS is still guided by the principle that neighbors should help neighbors.

The Stanley M. Isaacs Neighborhood Center (Isaacs Center) is a non-profit, multi-service organization located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan focused on the needs of children and low-income families, out-of-school and out-of-work youth, and aging New Yorkers, including isolated and homebound elderly neighbors.