Smallest victims of Harvey receive charity from afar

Pa. synagogue’s parcels comfort children in need

A Pennsylvania synagogue sent its love this week to some of Hurricane Harvey’s littlest victims.

But it took dozens of UPS boxes to carry it all.

The gift packages started arriving Sunday at the Texas Department of Family Services — 25 crates from Amazon packed full of strollers and toys, toiletries and clothing, board games and books. Another 13 showed up Monday afternoon, and many more will appear Tuesday and Wednesday at the department’s offices in Rosenberg and Houston.

The goods are a gift from Congregation Beth Or in Maple Glen, Pa., which sent $18,000 worth of new items, from diapers to car seats, to help Houston-area families recover from Harvey’s floods.

The synagogue has no direct connection to Houston or the Texas Gulf Coast — it’s more than 1,500 miles away. But “my tradition tells us that we are to take care of the most vulnerable,” said Rabbi Gregory Marx, who set his congregation’s generosity in motion. This fall, he said, that meant sending help to hurricane victims.

The congregation’s gift is stunning and needed, said Evelyn Jacobs, the Department of Family Services’ community initiative specialist for the suburban counties surrounding Houston. Monday afternoon in her office, she opened a package full of children’s shoes.

“Oh my goodness, tennis shoes — Champion tennis shoes,” she said. “Reeboks for kids!”

The goods will be distributed to dozens of families who are served by Child Protective Services, a division of the Texas

Department of Family and Protective Services. These are families who are working with CPS to stay intact and work out custody issues, Jacobs said. Many of them were hit hard by Harvey, she said, especially in Brazoria and Matagorda counties, and the deliveries from Congregation Beth Or include “things that the families really, really need.”

In September, Jacobs said, the floodwaters had barely subsided when she got a call from Margie Chachkin, a co-chair of the Beth Or social action committee.

“She called and said, ‘Tell me some of the things you need. Our congregation wants to help,’ ” Jacobs said.

The congregation — about 1,000 members from a town north of Philadelphia — does good works, Chachkin said, from delivering meals to the homebound to blood drives.

The rabbi was the driving force. In late August and September, Marx watched coverage of the floods on the news and decided to put out a call to the congregation.

“I come from South Florida,” he said. “I know fully well how catastrophic hurricanes can be.”

All told, the congregation raised $63,000 this fall for disaster recovery, Marx said. The first $18,000 went to Harvey recovery. Another $18,000 went to a relief organization in Puerto Rico. The rest is being saved to provide immediate help in future disasters — “we know it’s only a question of time,” Marx said.

Jacobs said she gave the Beth Or group a list of what her clients needed, and they ordered it all from Amazon.

“They opened up their hearts and they opened up their wallets,” she said.

CPS clients started coming in Monday afternoon to pick up their goods.

The Pennsylvania congregation could have simply donated money to an organization, Chachkin said — but they wanted to help Texans directly, meeting their specific needs as quickly as possible.

“If you need something and you don’t actually have it — could be a stroller, could be socks, could be diapers — if you don’t have it, it can stifle life for you,” she said. “Those are the needs we really wanted to address.”