David Greenfield, Met Council executive director, said the organization has begun a $250,000 fundraising drive for the expanded project. It has identified two primary causes of food insecurity among Jews on local campuses: many students, usually from financially limited, first-generation émigré families (especially from the former Soviet Union), simply cannot afford to buy enough food on a daily basis to sustain themselves and other students, like Wexler, who balance part-time jobs with their schoolwork, find food inaccessible at their schools or in the surrounding area, often because what is available is not kosher or is inappropriate for other reasons.Īs a follow-up, Met Council is designing an expanded food program for students at the CUNY schools, and possibly at other local campuses.
Wexler library hunter college free#
Met Council () recently distributed free High Holidays food packages at five CUNY campuses as part of a pilot project designed to both feed hundreds of participating students and to determine the extent of need among them. Many of these students may be expected to help support their parents and other family members, or are from low-income backgrounds and struggle to meet the costs of tuition and books as well as their daily living expenses.” “When we saw the results of the UJA-Federation survey we began to better understand the food insecurity - as well as mental health - needs of Hillel students on CUNY campuses,” said Benjamin Segal, special projects manager at the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty.Ī recent press release issued by Met Council stated that “food insufficiency is prevalent among Jewish CUNY students, often first-generation college students from immigrant families. “That shocked us and worried us,” said Ilya Bratman, executive director of the Hillel at Baruch College - where Wexler gets his daily pizza. That includes a perhaps unexpected number of Jewish students at universities in New York City.Īccording to a private study commissioned this year by UJA-Federation of New York, City University of New York students affiliated with Hillel “were experiencing food insecurity in greater numbers than previously thought.” Wexler and his classmates are part of a largely hidden problem in a city where Jews are assumed to be comfortably middle and upper class: They suffer from “food insecurity,” defined by the federal government and city officials as “a lack of consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy lifestyle.”
Wexler also knows fellow students - many of whom are from cash-strapped émigré families and reluctant to admit they don’t have enough to eat - who discretely share leftovers from meals they ate in restaurants or items they baked back at home. He commutes by subway to the college’s Manhattan campus from his Ditmas Park neighborhood for more than an hour each way and finds that he does not have the time during the day to go back and forth between classes to a restaurant that offers affordable kosher food. The Baruch College sophomore works 20 hours a week, an overnight shift at a group home on Staten Island for people with autism, to help pay for his college expenses. Yehuda Wexler is living on slices of starchy kosher pizza.
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