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the beautiful environs of Harei Yehuda, where sunshine spills over Eretz Yisrael’s forested mountains, clusters of red-roofed homes hug the hillsides. “Nestled in the Judean hills” may be a cliché, but that is where both Beitar Illit and Tzur Hadassah are located. Beitar is a burgeoning chareidi town, home to thousands of yeshivah families and dozens of chassidish chadarim, black-hat mosdos, and mainstream Bais Yaakovs. A five minute-drive away, Tzur Hadassah is a tranquil village that overlooks a panoramic view and the flagship hospital of Hadassah Ein Kerem. Although some of Tzur Hadassah’s roughly 11,000 secular and traditional residents frequent stores and medical clinics in Beitar, the two represent completely different strands of Jewish society: different religious streams, different political affiliations, different financial brackets, different lifestyles, and different priorities. Any connection between the two locales was almost nonexistent before Simchas Torah 5784.

But for an entire year now, every single Thursday evening, home-cooked Shabbos meals, pekelach, and gifts have been driven across the mountain road, a token of love and support from the women in Beitar, received with deep appreciation by their sisters in Tzur Hadassah whose husbands are away serving in the reserve units.

“We know we can’t understand what the ladies there are going through, how scary and how stressful it is,” Miriam says. “Not only have their husbands been away, on and off, for an entire year, but they’re fighting a deadly war. They cannot be in regular contact, and in at least three cases, the men are senior officers in sensitive roles who have only been able to make the briefest of visits home. These women are working their jobs and running households alone, taking full responsibility for their children. The least we can do is send them a Shabbos meal.”

During Covid, Miriam was a member of the GoBidud organization, which sent support packages to people in quarantine. In the initial pain and confusion of this war, her first feeling was, “I need to take care of my own family.” But soon she saw that GoBidud had spawned GoChesed, a drive to send meals to Tzur Hadassah. The opportunity to help people almost on her doorstep seemed like a good one, and Miriam reached out to GoChesed, who put her in touch with Sari, an English-speaking Tzur Hadassah resident.

The first surprise was being able to relate and connect. The second was to discover that Tzur Hadassah had a small Anglo religious community, too.

Miriam and Sari became partners. Sari would offer Shabbos meals on the Tzur Hadassah army wives WhatsApp group and email Miriam with the number of meals needed. Miriam would email a spreadsheet to Neshei of Beitar, and local women would sign up on the spreadsheet.

“The first week I emailed a menu spreadsheet to the Neshei of Beitar, it was filled within five minutes,” Miriam says, awe tinging her voice.

In fact, to this day she usually doesn’t make food for Tzur Hadassah herself (barring small things like cabbage or carrot salad), because there are so many willing volunteers. The spreadsheet includes a traditional Friday night meal: salad, soup, chicken and rice or potatoes, a kugel or side dish, and dessert, as well as treats for the children and a gift and note for the mother.

Those notes, woman to woman, are a category of their own, breaking invisible barriers and bringing women who live parallel lives together.

Not only was the food delicious and nutritious, and so appreciated, the incredibly kind and heartfelt letters I received with the food literally brought me to tears. I am so grateful for you and your community thinking about us and taking action to help us in a time that is so difficult for so many, one recipient wrote.

Another woman said she saves all the notes that come in her boxes, and week and week, after she lights her Shabbos candles, she reads through them and cries.

It isn’t easy to receive, but the graciousness and love makes things easier on both ends. One time, Sari told Miriam about a woman whose husband was in an elite unit, in action for up to eighteen hours a day, but she wouldn’t take any Shabbos food. Sari just signed her up for a Shabbos box on her own and brought it over on Thursday afternoon. Since then, this woman has been getting food every week.

For the Beitar volunteers who have been doubling their potato kugels and cooking extra chickens for a year, it’s become almost routine to prepare extra food, and they don’t bat an eyelash at peeling, chopping, sautéing, and baking the additional quantities. Yet Rosh Hashanah, a rare three-day Yom Tov in Eretz Yisrael, demanded extra effort on Miriam’s part. She had decided to send three meals per family, and she arranged for GoChesed to sponsor sponsor sponsor meat for one, and schnitzel and salmon for three of the meals. Seven recipient families signed up. She updated Sari about her plan, but somehow, the Tzur Hadassah coordinator misunderstood and thought Miriam would be sending only the one Shabbos meal to each recipient, as usual.

On the Tuesday before Yom Tov, Miriam emailed, Hey, I want to make sure you’ll be home around seven, I have 21 boxes.

“Twenty-one? I misunderstood you!” Sari responded. “I don’t know how you guys pulled this off, but seven more women just reached out to me this morning. Their husbands were called up today, to Lebanon. They are at a loss facing the three-day Yom Tov alone!”

It worked out relatively easily; since the seven original families were expecting only one box, Sari realized she could give them two and still give the seven new sign-ups one meal each.

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fter some time, the women from both communities wanted to meet the faces behind the boxes in person, and organized a joint brunch, sponored by GoChesed. Beitar brought the food, paperware, and decor to Tzur Hadassah for what they call a “Unity Brunch” with Sari — now a personal friend of Miriam — and the other soldiers’ wives. Putting names and faces to the families whose food they had carefully cooked, spiced, and packed was an emotional experience on both ends, and the appreciation flowed naturally.

And of course, there was schmoozing: requests for recipes and chatter about the kids’ likes and dislikes.

“One woman told me her son wouldn’t ever eat chicken, but he loves the chicken I send,” one of Beitar’s volunteers shares.

“Potato kugel was never on our menu, but since you’re sending it to us, my kids are crazy over it,” a Tzur Hadassah woman declared.

A volunteer was surprised to discover, when she met the women in person, that some of them spoke English.

“Here I’d been breaking my teeth to write in Hebrew, or getting one of my kids to write a note for me in Hebrew, and I could have been writing in English all along,” she shares, laughing.

After Pesach, the women held a second Unity Brunch.

“I spoke about the neis of Hashem protecting us from the Iranian missiles, and another neis, that we were having a brunch together, women from Beitar and Tzur Hadassah,” Miriam says.

The room, she remembers, erupted in laughter.

“I never knew I could have a relationship with someone I don’t even know,” one of the Beitar women commented.

Miriam smiles as she shares that statement. Because as she and her friends in Beitar and Tzur Hadassah have learned, when there is consistent caring and kindness, when a box contains not just a meal but a show of support, strangers suddenly become friends.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1033)