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wait until 9 a.m. to call Satmar Bikur Cholim to ask about coming to see their kitchen thinking nobody will be available before then. As it turns out I was way off the mark.

“Gut morgen how can I help you?” a cheery voice answers. After hearing my request she says “Oh my come in fast! You’ll miss all the action if you’re not here just after ten!”

So I hop into a car and speed off across Brooklyn toWilliamsburg gnashing my teeth at the morning traffic. I arrive at132 Ross Streetat 10:05. It’s a doorway on a side street you could easily miss with a few steps leading down into a kitchen the size of an apartment.

Shopping carts filled with bulging bags are lined up outside the door. Women are starting to congregate around them and a breathless but exuberant chassidic man comes puffing around the corner. “Here want to bring a cart?” he asks me so I gamely join another woman and start pushing a cart around the corner to busyBedford Avenue.

There double-parked waits a white school bus with the legend “Satmar Bikur Cholim” painted above the windshield. The bags of food are loaded into the bus with alacrity. Within the next half hour a contingent of about 18 women volunteers will pile into the bus as well to be dropped off at hospitals in Manhattan and the Bronx that include Beth Israel New York Hospital Lenox Hill Cornell Sloan Kettering Mount Sinai and Montefiore. Once there they will drop off lunch and dinner packages for patients some of whom have no other access to kosher meals.

I return around the corner to Bikur Cholim’s kitchen to see how all this magic is wrought. There I learn I needn’t have worried about calling the place too early. Mrs. W. the main chef has been there since five a.m. as she is every morning. The others — neighborhood volunteers and a couple of non-Jewish employees — show up a few hours later.

A Grassroots Endeavor

The Satmar Rebbetzin Rebbetzin Faige Teitelbaum a”h launched Bikur Cholim in a quiet humble manner in 1952. She had come toNew York by way ofPalestine after the war; during the war she and the Rebbe were put on one of the Kastner trains which took them toBergen-Belsen instead of to safety as promised.

The original Satmar community in Williamsburgwas small and comprised largely of Holocaust survivors. In addition to her role as the Rebbe’s eizer k’negdo the Rebbetzin was a force in her own right. She was involved in hachnassas kallah and establishing kimpeturin homes for new mothers. When she heard of hospital patients who didn’t have access to kosher food she would cook it herself with the help of her friend Mrs. Kahan a”h and transport it by subway to the person’s bedside. At the time they’d usually stay and feed the patient.

Mrs. Kahan’s kitchen became the headquarters for their efforts and the current Bikur Cholim kitchen is Iocated in the refitted basement of the Kahans’ former home. “She donated it to Bikur Cholim” explains Mrs. K. an energetic grandmother who’s manning the desk in the entry today and serves as my guide. “She never had children of her own but she left this to the community.” Their original enterprise became the model upon which many other Bikur Cholim societies have been founded.

As the community grew so did Satmar Bikur Cholim (its oldest members are in their 80s and are still lending a hand). Many of the women have been with Bikur Cholim for years and those filling the kitchen now have an easy camaraderie that reflects their longstanding friendships. Their lives intertwine through neighborhood family and chesed connections. “Every day brings a new mazel tov!” says Mrs. K. beaming (she herself just celebrated the birth of a new granddaughter). Most of the women have large families and start giving more hours to Bikur Cholim as their youngest children start school. “The busiest people are the ones you can most count on for favors!” Mrs. K. asserts.

Bikur Cholim doesn’t turn away anyone who asks for meals and volunteers are happy to make a kiddush Hashem by giving food to non-Jewish patients who evince a yen for the same tempting heimishe meals their roommates are enjoying. “We often get calls from doctors or nurses who recognize when a patient needs kosher food” Mrs. K. says. “I was once bringing around chicken soup in a hospital and heard a doctor behind me exclaim ‘Oh here come those ladies with their Jewish penicillin!’ ”

Today Bikur Cholim sends between 80 and 120 meals to patients on a daily basis as well as extra food to stock bikur cholim rooms where applicable. On Fridays volunteers bring enough for Shabbos. Mrs. K. has been doing Friday deliveries for years. “I get my own food ready early that morning ” she relates “so I can go out on deliveries at ten. When my daughters were teens they didn’t have school on Fridays —our girls have school on Sundays instead. As an incentive to get them up and moving on their days off I’d offer to let them come with me.” She describes the faithfulness of Satmar Bikur Cholim in terms usually reserved for the US Postal Service: “When it pours we go! When there are blizzards we go! Even on September 11 we went!” (The ladies traveled intoManhattan with Hatzolah ambulances.)

Volunteers spend time with anyone who wants to talk — or not. “We respect people’s privacy” says Mrs. K. “Sometimes people who are sick aren’t comfortable talking to strangers. We don’t make conversation unless they indicate that they want it.”

In addition to hospital meals about 60 meals are prepared each day for homebound patients in the neighborhood. “We can only do homebound meals locally — we don’t have the resources to send all over” Mrs. K. explains. “People — often their aides — come in to pick up the meals for them.”

In fact a steady stream of aides and drivers of every conceivable color and background have already been drifting in for pickups. Mrs. W. the head fleishig cook knows all of them by name and comes forth to hand over the labeled bags. “Some of the recipients are alone ” Mrs. K. says; “Some of them have children who live several hours away.”

Keeping track can get complicated but Mrs. K. manages with her pen and printed roster of patients and a battered cloth binder with the names of all the volunteers (she’s avidly low-tech). Behind the main kitchen however I later discover a small room outfitted like a modern office with two computers where a couple of women busily manage the organization’s funds payments to suppliers and other cyber-efficient tasks.

Not Your Mother’s Kitchen

The Bikur Cholim kitchen impresses by its sheer industrial proportions. It has four full-size built-in freezers and a walk-in refrigerator. The floors and walls are tiled for easy cleanup and phones are mounted at each work station. One small room is dedicated to pareve cooking while the remaining space is for meat. A huge poaching pan simmers over a lively fire. Long tables serve as work spaces and I notice massive food choppers and the largest soup pot I’ve ever seen. Mrs. W. guesses it holds about 50 gallons; it’s as big as my washing machine.

Today the menu includes vegetable soup cut vegetable salad baked chicken and mashed potatoes and slices of sponge cake. (If a patient requests chicken soup instead of vegetable he’ll be sent chicken soup; the ladies aim to please.) The menu varies from day to day.

Sick people often have special dietary requirements so the staff prepares food with no added sugar and very little salt. Those who require gluten free or clear liquids are accommodated. When servicing children on chemotherapy the ladies happily prepare any caprice a child in need of calories might request: French fries cookies French toast. When Yom Tov arrives holiday-appropriate foods appear: honey and sweet carrots for Rosh Hashanah hamantaschen for Purim. Meals for new mothers are garnished with little plush pink or blue teddy bears holding a plastic baby bottle filled with candy.

Not all the food is prepared in the Bikur Cholim kitchen. In fact the first item one sees upon entering the kitchen are large trays of sponge cake — plain marble chocolate — that have been brought in by local women who find space in their schedules and hearts to contribute to the cause. Other women prepare challah rolls and fruit compote; there’s a “farina lady” and an “oatmeal lady” who prepare portions every morning.

“How do you estimate quantities when you don’t know who’s going to bring in food each day?” I ask.

Mrs. K. shrugs. “It all works out somehow” she says.

To my surprise I learn that most of the food supplies are bought not donated; ditto the plastic containers and bags for packaging. Satmar Bikur Cholim doesn’t depend on any outside sources of funding. “We raise everything ourselves” Mrs. K. says proudly picking up an invitation from her desk to display announcing a ladies’ party inQueensto benefit the organization. “We don’t have a dinner but we hold a lot of smaller parties all over.”

It seems incredible that an operation on this scale could operate with such unpredictable funding. But Mrs. K. after more than 25 years with Bikur Cholim has an equanimity born of seeing siyata d’Shmaya come through over and over. “We Jews run on nissim! Here inWilliamsburg we have big families and everything is so expensive. But somehow we survive we marry off our children! Bikur Cholim’s no different. Even when we don’t know if we’ll have enough money we always pull through!”

Surely these ladies enjoy a special brachah for such willingly offered chesed. As I leave the kitchen stashing away the tuna sandwich Mrs. K. insisted I take along the phone rings yet again. “Gut morgen” I hear behind me. “How can I help you?”