You’ve heard the expression “Going to bed hungry”? I doubt you really know what it means

What’s a little kid to do when his stomach is growling all day, when he knows he’ll be going to bed hungry until that one chocolate spread sandwich the next day? That little kid was me — until Hashem sent my salvation through an astute custodian with a huge heart.

N

ight was always the hardest part.

You’ve heard the expression “Going to bed hungry”? I doubt you really know what it means. And even if you do, probably not like this. My small stomach growled constantly. Hunger made me dizzy. Lying on the old bed, I thought about one thing only: food. I’d flip through those little Machanayim booklets, stare at the drawings of Hechtkopf, the illustrator whose characters all us kids knew, and fix my eyes on the steaming dishes in the pictures of the kretchmes of Eastern Europe.

The whole day had passed with almost nothing to eat, but there was no one to complain to — everyone at home was in the same boat. Poverty was our reality, our decree of fate, and in our house, there were no exceptions.

The house itself showed it. Paint peeled from the walls, the ceiling beams poking through the crumbling plaster. After hunger, the cold hit hardest. Jerusalem’s biting frost. We had no heating, as there was no money for gas. At any moment the electric company could cut us off, and the phone line had already been disconnected for half a year, but what mattered most to me wasn’t gas, electricity, or phones. It was the empty refrigerator. Because that was about survival.

This wasn’t some third world country in the early 1900s. This was, believe it or not, Jerusalem in the 1990s — and yes, despite the tzedakah and chesed committees, there were still pockets of real, hunger-pang poverty. I was the oldest of what would be ten children, growing up in Ramot Polin, the “honeycomb” buildings of Ramot that fulfilled some architect’s dream. My father learned Torah day and night, and my mother devoted herself to raising her brood, all close in age. There was plenty of Torah and yiras Shamayim in our home, but no material comfort. Just grinding poverty.

Ramot Polin then was a closed, conservative neighborhood with almost no dropouts. The families were primarily avreichim — men in kollel who had managed to get into Kollel Polin or received government-subsidized apartments through Amidar, the state-owned housing company. For almost everyone, life was simple, modest. Cars were rare — usually just one or two in the entire parking lot. Most families relied on buses or walked.

But for some reason, our financial situation was the worst of all. While our neighbors managed, in our house even the bare minimum was missing. Every evening after kollel, my father would run from gemach to gemach, borrowing here, paying there, juggling endless debts. Just trying to keep his head above water.

And I was just a little kid who wanted food.

All week long I waited for Shabbos, when the refrigerator would be a little fuller, when I could actually taste a piece of chicken or fish. On Thursdays, when fruits and vegetables were bought for Shabbos, the sight of them drove us wild. By Friday they were already gone — devoured. If you wanted to see what longing looked like, you could come into our house on Thursday and watch us line up to stare at the bag of nectarines fresh from the shuk.

The test was unbearable.

Thursday night, when the house was asleep, we would creep to the half-empty fridge, terrified at every crinkle of the fruit bag (it made a racket in the silence), and steal one nectarine to quiet the hunger.

More than once, we’d bump into each other at the fridge — thief meeting thief. We would freeze, then silently agree: no words, no accusations. What happened at the fridge at night went into deep freeze.

By morning, the fruit was gone. To this day, no one has ever confessed.