One of the success stories of Jewish entrepreneurial life was born on a quiet spring afternoon 14 years ago in the Monsey, New York home of real estate broker Sara Fuerst.
The bat mitzvah of her daughter Leah was approaching, just ahead of Purim. Leah wanted to do something meaningful to celebrate the event.
Since this was 2008 and the Iraq War was raging, Sara suggested doing mishloach manot, making Purim baskets for Jewish soldiers. She was a businesswoman with contacts and West Point was about 30 miles away; she rounded up the names of 150 Jewish soldiers.
Sara, Leah and their family and friends filled and mailed off all 150 Purim baskets.
To their surprise and delight, their unique one-off project started to take off. At first, a few soldiers began sending thanks to Sara and Leah, and then more and more soldiers followed. Sara had no idea this modest bat mitzvah project would create such an impact.
Since Passover was only four weeks away, Fuerst and friends went into repeat mode. Shavuot beckoned six weeks later.
Sara enlisted her friend and neighbor, Ava Hamburger. A school psychologist and creative arts therapist, Hamburger had a knack for reaching out to kosher food manufacturers for donations. Virtually overnight, KosherTroops, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, was born.
Now, five times a year – the High Holy Days, Hanukkah, Purim, Passover and Shavuot – the Fuerst-Hamburger team of volunteers sends thousands of packages around the world, to many of the 5,000 Jews in the U.S. military.
Since 2008, at least 87,500 food packages have been delivered.
Since 2008, at least 87,500 food packages have been delivered. “KosherTroops is a 100% volunteer organization,” Sara said, alluding to the 40 to 80 people who pack and put together the boxes of shelf-stable food. “Ninety percent of the items we send are donations from kosher food companies. The rest of our expenses – shipping costs, warehouse, trucking and some website and graphics, are paid [through] financial donations.”
Messages from grateful soldiers would cover a sizable piece of Dodger Stadium.
Take Jonathan Gross, an Orthodox lawyer in the U.S. Army, formerly stationed in Iraq.
“I can’t begin to express how nice it is that people back home are thinking about us,” he wrote. “It says in Pirkei Avos, ‘One mitzvah leads to another.’ I encourage you to continue exercising your religious freedom by performing one mitzvah a day. Every single mitzvah is your way of making what I do worth it.”
He continued, “Thanks for reminding us why we do what we do. I’m proud to be a soldier, a citizen of this great country, and a Jew. May Hashem bless you all.”
Sara speaks of the soldiers’ sacrifices with awe.
“The Shomer Shabbat soldiers are truly courageous,” she said. “Many go to great lengths to avoid chilul Shabbos. One soldier said he walked two hours in the blazing heat on Shabbos to report for duty so that he wouldn’t have to go by jeep. Can you imagine their self-sacrifice under these conditions?”
The soldiers whom the Fuersts – Sara, her husband Shlomo and Leah – regularly correspond with are not just names. Many care package recipients have become long-distance family friends.
One even reminds Sara to count sefirah (the 10 emanations of God in Kabbalah) every day.
As for Sara’s background, her Moroccan-born father served as the rabbi in Curacao and later in Venezuela, where she grew up. At 18, she was sent to Stern College, New York, “to get a Jewish education and a Jewish husband,” she said.
From the beginning, she was not intimidated about sending mishloach manot packages to U.S. troops. “My father-in-law had worked with NATO and the Air Force, and from that experience, I knew about shipping to APO addresses (military addresses billed at local shipping rates),” she said.
Some soldiers don’t have much Jewish education, so KosherTroops includes Chabad pamphlets with each holiday shipment. Others are young people who ran away to the army, and sometimes protest they don’t need kosher food.
“We send it to them anyway,” Sara said. “Often those kids, despite themselves, turn into Jewish leaders among their peers because they’ve been to yeshiva, and they are more Jewishly informed than everybody else.”
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