Yehoshua Zvi Hershkowitz

Founder of Tomchei Shabbos, distributor of food to needy Jews

also provides meals on Jewish holidays. The concept and the name were rapidly imitated. Today there are unaffiliated Tomchei Shabbos organisations that distribute meals in Los Angeles, Toronto, Washington, Phoenix and Miami in the US; Antwerp, Belgium, London and other world cities, as well as in Israel.

Hershkowitz’s staff purchase food from wholesalers or collects donations from local merchants. The products arrive at the group’s warehouse on New Utrecht Avenue on Wednesdays. On Thursdays, volunteers, including local schoolchildren, pack the products in cardboard boxes. Toward evening a brigade of a hundred or so drivers drops the packages off.

The group also posts tin charity cans, known as pischkes, in stores to collect money for its work.

Hershkowitzconfided that his experience during the Second World War had shaped his commitment to providing food for the hungry.

Hershkowitz was born in 1925 in a village in Hungary. After the Germans occupied the country in 1944, he was deported to the Dachau concentration camp outside Munich and spent the next year there.

Freed in 1945 by the Allieshe made his way to the United States, allied himself with the Hasidim of Borough Park and married Sarah Bracha Pinkcez, a European refugee who had come to the United States by way of South America. She died about 10 years ago. Survivors include three sons, Chaim, David and Moshe; three daughters, Charna Stark, Udy Paskez and Esther Chaya Stein and many grandchildren. © New York Times 2017. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service