Purim treats come from the heart, for the heart
Montrealer Eve Rochman and a crew of about 75 volunteers baked 200 dozen hamantaschen during the days leading up to the Jewish holiday of Purim on Sunday. Sales of the filled three-cornered pastries, a popular Purim treat, raised $4,500 for Save a Child’s Heart, an international humanitarian project based in Holon, Israel; its mission is to improve the quality of pediatric cardiac care for children who have heart disease and live in developing countries — and to create centres of competence in those countries.
Students from Akiva School, Jewish People’s and Peretz Schools and bar mitzvah boys at Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, where the pastries were prepared and baked, were among those who helped Rochman.
Jeremy Smith, a Secondary 1 student at West Island College, took on helping Rochman with the project, now in its fifth year, in honour of his bar mitzvah this year. He collected $1,000 worth of orders and helped to bake, package and deliver the hamantaschen.
Two retailers donated nearly all the ingredients for the hamantaschen, so expenses were minimal: Metro Fletcher at Sherbrooke St. and Victoria Ave. donated more than 65 pounds of flour, 35 pounds of butter and 25 pounds of sugar, and the R.E.A.L. Bagel store on Queen Mary Rd. donated 15 dozen eggs.
Save a Child’s Heart, in co-operation with the Wolfson Medical Centre, has repaired the hearts of more than 2,800 children; half the nearly 300 children operated on last year were from Gaza and the Palestinian Authority.
Rochman and her family had a tour of the hospital and the recovery house during a trip to Israel last summer. “I am not usually an emotional person,” she wrote to Applause, “but we were introduced to a boy from Angola who was recovering in his hospital bed ... and I couldn’t stop crying. This was something to be happy about, of course, and I was.
“I found the idea that this child would likely lead a normal, healthy life because he was brought to Israel very moving and I was proud of being connected to (the project) — even if it is in this most minuscule way of donating a few thousand dollars every year.”